


If You Won't Spill Your Heart (I'll Chase You for the Words You Owe)

by JuniperJupiter



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bedsharing, Doctor Clarke Griffin, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Historian Bellamy Blake, Minor Octavia Blake/Lincoln, Organized Crime, Roommates, Slow Burn, Small Towns, Witness Protection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-17
Updated: 2020-11-30
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 45,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25342195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniperJupiter/pseuds/JuniperJupiter
Summary: Bellamy Blake and Clarke Griffin have known – and hated – each other for eighteen years.  But when they accidentally witness a murder at the hands of the powerful Wallace family, they are placed into the Witness Protection Program together and sent to a small mountain town called Shallow Valley.  Forced to live with and rely on each other, will they find a way to overcome their previous animosity?  And just how safe are they from the formidable Wallaces?A Witness Protection Program AU combining enemies to friends to lovers, found families, and some good old-fashioned delinquent fun in the mountains.  Oh, and some organized crime for funsies.Rating might change if I get brave enough to attempt some smut in later chapters, but there will be a warning!Title from “Home by Now” by Hippo Campus
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 63
Kudos: 169





	1. Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My first 100 fic and my first fic on AO3! I hope you enjoy - I'm having a lot of fun writing it.
> 
> Everything I know about the Witness Protection Program comes from the Mary Kate and Ashley movie Our Lips Are Sealed. So what I'm saying is, get ready for some serious accuracy here.

Chapter 1: Wrong Place at the Wrong Time

Sergeant Pike rubbed his temples for the fifth time in the past few minutes. He had thought interviewing both witnesses together would save time, but after dealing with these two and their obvious loathing for each other for the past hour, he was starting to wish he had just spoken with them separately.

“I’ll ask you one more time,” he started, trying his best to maintain some semblance of patience. “Why were you in the alley behind The Arc at midnight?”

The Arc was a local bar, popular with twenty-somethings eager for socialization but without the cash to go anywhere classier.

The young man in front of him opened his mouth to speak, but the blonde woman next to him cut him off again.

“Because _someone_ needed to smoke and didn’t want his sister to catch him,” Clarke Griffin told the officer.

“I didn’t need to smoke! I just needed some air and that was the closest door!” Bellamy Blake fired back.

Clarke opened her mouth to argue again, but the officer cut her off, eager to move on from this pointless disagreement.

“And why did you follow him out there?” he asked Clarke.

“Good question,” Bellamy agreed, turning to the blonde, who narrowed her eyes in response.

She turned back to the officer. “He was supposed to be my ride home after our night out and I didn’t want him to leave without me… again,” she explained, spitting out the last word. The man next to her threw his arms up in response.

“That was _one time_!” he shouted, and Clarke immediately turned to him and jabbed a finger in his face, shouting “It was _three times,_ Bellamy, and I-”

The officer cut them off there, feeling his headache intensify.

“Look, I’m going to be honest, I really don’t care about any of these details. I want to go home and I need to figure out what to do with you.”

The two shrunk back in their seats, avoiding eye contact with each other. Almost simultaneously, they each crossed their arms. The officer would have laughed had he not been so exhausted.

“Okay,” he began. “Miss Griffin, please tell me what you saw after you and Mr. Blake entered the alleyway. And please don’t tell me any more about why you were there or how much you hate Mr. Blake or his smoking habits or any other useless details.”

Clarke let out a sigh. She took a moment to organize her thoughts before responding.

“We were standing in the alley, arguing about- ” she stopped herself, seeing the officer narrow his eyes.

“Arguing about something,” she continued. “Our voices were raised, so we didn’t hear what was happening at first, but suddenly we heard a loud crashing noise, and when we looked up, we saw two men throwing a third against a trash can.”

“It was a stack of trash cans,” Bellamy interjected, before continuing the story himself. “And then one of the attackers pulled out a gun and shot the man he had just thrown into the trash cans.”

Clarke gritted her teeth and held her eyes closed tightly at the memory. The officer thought for a moment that Bellamy might actually lean over and take her hand, rub her shoulder, or do something else to comfort her. The young man lifted his hand for a moment, but then returned it to its crossed position.

Pike handed them each a stack of photographs and a pen and asked them to mark any photos they thought might be the men they had seen that night. He asked them to do it separately, to avoid confirmation bias. They both checked the same two photographs and were very confident they were the men they had seen. When Pike looked at the two they had selected, his suspicions and fears were confirmed.

“And what did you do after witnessing the shooting?” Sergeant Pike asked. There was another moment of pause, and Bellamy turned to Clarke to let her tell the next part of their story.

“I tried to help,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean, help?” Pike asked.

“I’m an emergency room doctor,” she explained. “I thought I could save him.”

“And you didn’t think the two men who had just thrown him against trash cans and shot him might object to you lending a hand?”

Pike knew his question held more sarcasm than it should, but it was late, and he was exhausted. He expected the blonde to get mad, but he didn’t expect the angry man next to her to jump to her aid.

“Hey man, leave her alone. She followed her instincts. Instincts that keep the people in this city alive, by the way,” he asserted.

The dynamic between these two was interesting. They clearly disliked each other, but there was something below the surface… Pike was starting to suspect there was more to the story than he was getting. He was too tired to care that night, though.

“And what happened after you approached the scene?” he asked.

“I ran over to help, and Bellamy followed me, probably trying to stop me,” Clarke guessed, and Bellamy nodded in agreement, looking back at his shoes again and keeping his arms firmly crossed. “And then a van pulled up and the two men jumped into it. I called 911 as quickly as I could… but it was too late. He was dead.”

Pike took notes on the details of her story.

“Did the gunmen get a good look at you two? At your faces?” he asked.

The pair looked at each other and nodded.

“There was a big safety light shining in the alley, so I think it’s safe to say they got a pretty good look,” Bellamy admitted.

“One last question, and then I’ll let you two go for the night,” Pike said. “At any point, did either of them hear your names?”

Clarke and Bellamy thought for a moment.

“I don’t think so,” Clarke replied.

“Even when you were arguing?” Pike asked.

They both thought hard for a moment, then shook their heads.

“What about when you were running after Clarke trying to stop her, Mr. Blake? I assume you shouted her name then?”

“No, I called her ‘Princess,’” Bellamy replied, and Clarke nodded her agreement after thinking for a moment.

“Princess?” Pike asked.

“It’s a long story,” Clarke replied, glaring at Bellamy.

Pike shut his notebook. “Well, as long as you two are sure you never said either of your names, this shouldn’t be as difficult as we thought.”

“What shouldn’t be?” Bellamy asked, confused.

“Finding a placement for you two,” Pike replied, as if it was obvious.

“A placement?” Clarke asked, just as confused as Bellamy.

“A placement in the Witness Protection Program. You two just witnessed a hit from the largest crime family in Arkadia – one of the largest crime families in the _country_ – and are now in grave danger. When I release you in a moment, you will officially enter protective custody. Together.”

“WHAT?!” They both shouted in unison, jumping to their feet.

* * *

“This is completely ridiculous,” Clarke muttered an hour later in the back of a van. She was wearing a black wig, oversized sunglasses, and a baseball cap for some team she had never heard of.

“For once, I agree with the princess,” Bellamy snapped back, trying to keep from rubbing off the fake beard and mustache the police had plastered to his face before they left the precinct.

“No one’s awake yet and you’re having us enter the hotel by a back door. Why on earth do we need these disguises?” Clarke asked Lieutenant Indra, the stern woman sent to escort them to their first safe location.

Indra’s patience was wearing thin. “To keep you both alive,” she explained, for at least the third time that night. Finally she saw the flashlight in the window next to the door blink twice.

“That’s our signal,” she explained to the pair, and the three of them slipped from the van and through the back door of the hotel. They were met by a large, muscular man with narrow, suspicious eyes.

“All set?” he asked.

“Move the cargo,” Indra replied, and the man led them a few doors down the hallway before flashing a key card and ushering them into a room on their left.

Bellamy noticed that the curtains had already been closed and that everything in the room – television, alarm clock, and even the mini coffee maker, had been unplugged.

“All precautions taken?” Indra asked, surveying the room as well.

“Of course,” the large man replied.

“And where are Echo and Lincoln?” she asked.

“Escorting the family members. They should be here momentarily.”

Bellamy and Clarke had each been given one phone call to contact one family member they could meet tonight to explain what was happening. Bellamy had called his younger sister, Octavia, and Clarke had phoned her mother, Abby Griffin.

The foursome stood around the room awkwardly, unsure of whether or where to sit. Clarke finally perched on the edge of the hotel bed, and Bellamy chose a chair in the corner. Indra and her partner remained standing.

After a few moments, the large man’s phone lit up with a notification and he looked at Indra and nodded. He moved back out to the hallway and Indra pulled out her pistol. 

Clarke rolled her eyes at how seriously they were taking everything. What was this, some cheesy procedural drama?

The large man returned leading four more people: Octavia, who was being escorted by another large man sporting some interesting tattoos; and her mother, who walked next to an intimidating woman with maybe the prettiest hair Clarke had ever seen. Not that that was relevant.

Once they were all in the room, Indra locked the door, pushed a chair up against it and sat herself in it for good measure, and lay her gun across her lap. Abby ran to her daughter and embraced her tightly, while Octavia launched herself first at Bellamy, and then Clarke, smushing them together.

“Introductions, quickly,” Indra announced. Bellamy, Clarke, Abby, and Octavia found places to sit, while the agents continued to stand.

The large man who had led them all into the hotel went first. “Roan,” he announced, before continuing to pace as the rest spoke.

Octavia’s escort was named Lincoln and Abby’s was Echo. After introductions, Indra laid out what was happening: what Bellamy and Clarke had witnessed, why it put them in danger, and how they were going to be protected.

Apparently, when Clarke went out to berate Bellamy behind the bar earlier that night (or morning? It had to be nearly 4 am at this point, Clarke thought, unsure of when the night’s earlier events had transpired), and the two launched into another of their drawn-out arguments, they inadvertently exposed themselves to a murder. And not just a murder, which would have been bad enough, but a murder committed at the hands of the most dangerous family and crime ring in the city: the Wallaces.

Roan explained that Dante Wallace was the figurehead of the organization, but that his son, Cage, was really running the show these days. The FBI had been watching them for years and currently had an agent working from the inside. They were closer to taking them down than they had been in years, but still needed time to gather more evidence and hopefully turn a few more members of the ring against Cage and his father.

“But what does this mean for Clarke?” Abby asked, adding “And Bellamy” as a clear afterthought.

“Maybe they didn’t even care that we saw them,” Clarke offered hopefully.

“Negative,” Echo replied. She continued to stare out the window through the crack created between the curtain and the wall as she spoke. “The hit last night was committed by Cage himself, which makes this situation even more dangerous. Cage is highly volatile and takes things extremely personally. Our inside agent has already let us know that you were specifically brought up in an emergency family meeting after the hit and that Cage is determined to silence you. They don’t have your names, but they have full details on your appearance. They are looking for you as we speak.”

“So I dye my hair?” Clarke asked.

“Not good enough” Echo replied again. They know what you look like and they’ll be expecting superficial changes like that. If you stay here, they will find you. Probably within days. Your families too. They are very good at what they do.”

“So where do they go?” Octavia asked. “And are the rest of us in danger, too?”

“They have no reason to suspect the rest of you,” Lincoln answered, and Clarke noticed that he sounded like the friendliest of the four agents. “As long as they don’t discover Clarke and Bellamy’s true identifications, you are in the clear. As a precaution, though, I would encourage you to stay away from the Arc and lay low for a while. If you have a friend outside of town, this might be a good time to visit them for a week or so.”

Octavia nodded.

“As for where they go,” Indra replied, looking down at her phone, “we’ve just learned the answer to that question.” She looked to Roan, Echo, and Lincoln. “It’s from Nia.”

“Nia?” Echo asked. “Why is she getting involved in this?”

“Who’s Nia?” Bellamy asked.

“None of your concern,” Roan shot back. “But just know that if she is getting involved, this is serious.”

Indra continued to read from her phone to the rest of the room.

“Bellamy and Clarke are being moved to Shallow Valley, Montana.”

“Shallow what?” Abby asked. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“That’s the point,” Indra told her, before turning back to her phone. “Because they did not expose their names, they may maintain their first names as part of their alias, though their last names must change for extra security. Clarke Griffin will hereby be known as Clarke Smith. Bellamy Blake is now Bellamy Jones.”

“Choosing common last names is a counterintelligence move,” Lincoln explained. “Makes it harder to find you when you have the same last name as hundreds of thousands of other people. Which is even more important when your first names are so distinctive.”

“They are being housed together, both for safety and for budgetary concerns,” Indra continued. “The four of us will be their handlers.”

The next fifteen minutes were spent in a flurry of questions and unsatisfying answers.

“What about our jobs?”

“We’ll speak to your directors and come up with an excuse that they can tell the rest of your colleagues so that no one will know the real reasons you are leaving. You will get new, similar jobs in Shallow Valley. If your salary is not comparable to what you make here, we can apply for an additional stipend.”

“What will we tell our friends?”

“Nothing – you will have no contact from this point forward. Clarke’s family will tell her friends that she received the opportunity to travel for Doctors Without Borders and will be traveling abroad for the foreseeable future in an area of the world that doesn’t allow for digital contact. Bellamy’s sister will tell his friends that a family emergency has taken him across the country and that he won’t have time to keep up with anyone.”

Clarke was impressed with how quickly they had come up with these explanations. They had clearly done this before. She was still skeptical, though.

“My friends won’t buy that,” she told them. “That’s not really how Doctors Without Borders works, and I would never just disappear without telling them.”

“Yeah, and what family emergency would require that I never speak to anyone ever again?” Bellamy added.

“Your friends will ask questions at first,” Indra replied in a tone that told them she had heard these concerns countless times before. “We will repeat the same explanations. They won’t believe them, but they will get distracted or bored quickly and stop asking questions.”

“That’s rude,” Clarke told her. Indra merely raised an eyebrow in response.

“So we have no contact with _anyone_?” Bellamy asked, reaching for his sister’s hand.

“You will have _limited_ contact,” Lincoln explained. “Once per month, one of the four us will check in with you. We will also give you each a burner phone that has the capacity to call three people, for three twenty-minute conversations – so one hour, total. We’ll need your three contacts by the time we leave here. These are the only people who can know the truth of what has happened, and for their safety and yours we still encourage you not to tell them any details about where you are over the phone.”

“And what about our apartments? Our stuff?” Clarke asked, feeling more desperate as the reality of the situation sunk in.

Roan handed them each a pad of hotel paper.

“List anything that you would like sent from your residence and we will send agents with your family members to retrieve them immediately,” he directed. “Everything else will be moved into storage.”

There was a pause before Clarke asked her last question.

“How long will we be gone?”

“Indefinitely,” Indra replied coldly.

“What does that mean?” demanded Octavia. “A week? A month? A year?”

“Indefinitely means indefinitely,” Roan explained. “We are hoping we are close to taking down the Wallaces. With any luck, you can return to your normal lives in a year or so. But know that this could last much longer.”

Abby Griffin choked on a sob at that and Bellamy, Clarke, and Octavia all looked equally distraught.

The agents were focused on their jobs, however, and decided that those questions had covered the basics.

“We leave in an hour,” Echo announced. “Come up with your contact lists and anything you want from your apartments during that time. And say your goodbyes,” she added, with a hint of gentleness that Clarke couldn’t help but appreciate in that moment.

With that, Indra signaled to Roan and the two of them left the room. Echo remained at the window and Lincoln moved to the door, both obviously standing guard.

The next hour flew by. It was a combination of practicality, with Bellamy and Clarke writing lists of things they wanted from their respective apartments, and sentiment, with family members embracing each other and struggling to hold back tears.

When Indra returned, Bellamy and Clarke handed her their lists, written on the hotel paper, and hugged their loved ones one last time.

“Take care of each other,” Octavia instructed, and Abby nodded her agreement.

“We’ll be home soon,” Bellamy assured her, but they all knew it was a hollow promise.

Roan and Echo escorted Bellamy and Clarke, with their disguises again secured, to a black SUV, while Indra went with Abby to Clarke’s apartment and Lincoln and Octavia traveled to Bellamy’s.

“You seriously had to list my sister as one of your three contacts?” Bellamy asked Clarke once they were safely in the car and on their way to the airport.

“She’s one of my best friends – of course I did. At least I was able to come up with three,” she fired back. She had listed Abby, Octavia, and her friend Wells. Bellamy had only listed Octavia and Miller, his best friend.

As Bellamy opened his mouth to issue a retort, Roan cut them both off.

“Pike warned me about you two. Can you even have a conversation without arguing?”

Bellamy and Clarke just responded by glaring at each other.

“How are you going to live together?” Echo asked with a dark chuckle.

“Is it too late to hand ourselves over to Cage Wallace?” Bellamy asked, earning himself an elbow to the gut from Clarke.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay real talk. Obviously in the actual Witness Protection Program, they would have to change their names. But who wants to read a Bellarke story about Jill and Steve? Let's just roll with it. Can we all agree to not worry too much about the WPP specifics?


	2. Preparations

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to post the first three chapters of this today, just to give everyone a sense of where the fic is going. From here, I hope to post a chapter every week or two.

Chapter 2: Preparations

Before they could go to Shallow Valley, Clarke and Bellamy first had to spend a week in Polis for training and an orientation to the Witness Protection Program. It felt odd to be traveling without any of their personal belongings. They had been forced to leave their phones at the police precinct so that their locations couldn’t be traced if the Wallaces discovered their identities. They had been allowed to keep their wallets and physical cash, but all of their cards and identifications were taken and destroyed. Bellamy was down to the clothes he had worn to the Arc that night, his old wallet, his watch, and $35 in cash. Clarke only had $17 in cash, but she did have a chapstick in her pocket that she was now feeling weirdly possessive of.

Because they had nothing else with them, the first stop was a local Target to pick up clothes and basic essentials like toiletries, all on the FBI’s dime, of course. Roan and Echo joined them and supervised, keeping a wary eye on the other shoppers, a vigilance that amused Bellamy and Clarke.

“We’re in a Target 300 miles away – I think we’re safe,” Clarke joked.

Roan and Echo did not laugh.

“Sheesh, tough crowd,” Clarke muttered under her breath, reaching for a stack of jeans and looking for her size.

“Never thought I’d see the princess shopping for clothes at Target,” Bellamy remarked, earning a scowl from Clarke.

“I’m a millennial. Of course I’ve shopped at Target. Even Michelle Obama shops at Target.”

“Can you two please just shut up and get what you need?” Roan interjected. He turned to Echo and asked her to pick up some painkillers, because the two of them were giving him a headache.

Clarke followed Echo over to the other side of the store, leaving Roan and Bellamy alone to pick through a pile of t-shirts.

“So what’s the story with you and Blondie?” Roan asked.

“Clarke? The short version is that she’s a pain in my ass and I’ve somehow never been able to shake her.”

Roan shot him a skeptical look, so Bellamy continued to explain.

“She was – is, I guess – my sister’s best friend. They started hanging out when they were ten and they were both kicked out of their girl scout troop. Leader’s daughter made fun of Octavia for not being able to afford the camping equipment they needed for an overnight, and Clarke decked her for it, so they were both kicked out. Then Clarke’s mom responded by starting a new troop, just for her daughter. Anything for the princess,” he said bitterly.

“Wait, so that’s why you call her ‘Princess?’ After she defended your little sister?”

“It’s not just that – Clarke’s family is loaded. She’s just had… a very different life than us,” Bellamy explained.

“So she’s had everything handed to her?” Roan asked.

The sudden flare of anger he saw in Bellamy’s eyes surprised him, given he had just explained why he hated and resented the girl.

“Clarke has worked for everything she has now – nobody works harder than her.”

Roan threw his hands up defensively. “Just working from what you told me,” he said.

The pair moved onto the socks and boxers and Roan risked another question.

“So that’s how she became friends with Octavia. But where did you come into the picture?”

“My mom wasn’t around much, so I had a big hand in raising O. That meant I spent a lot of time around Clarke. I thought I finally got rid of her when I went to college, but three years later, when she and O graduated high school, they both enrolled there too. Then the princess went and stole all of my friends and I got stuck with her again for the next decade,” Bellamy finished with a roll of his eyes.

Roan chuckled.

“And now you’re moving to the other side of the country – ”

“And I’m still not able to shake her. And, for what it’s worth, she’s still a giant pain in my ass,” Bellamy finished for him.

Roan clapped him on the shoulder before going to look for Echo.

“At least you’re in it together,” he said.

Bellamy shook his head and went to grab a new belt.

Thirty minutes and roughly $400 later, the foursome exited the store laden down with bags.

* * *

Their week of training took place at a nondescript townhouse just South of the center city. A kind-looking man welcomed them, introducing himself as Sinclair. He showed them each to a small bedroom where they could stay for the week and allowed them some time to settle in and rest, explaining that their training sessions would start the next day.

Most of the week seemed to fly by in a blur. Bellamy and Clarke were walked through all of the details of their new aliases and came up with thorough and compelling backstories for themselves. Sinclair spent forever explaining why they had to abstain from all social media, including others posting photos of them. There were sessions on vigilance and countersurveillance – things to look for that could signal they were being watched. There were even basic self-defense lessons, which Clarke enjoyed immensely, because she got the chance to knee Bellamy in the gut. She was supposed to wait until he braced himself, but when he muttered “I’ll defend myself by just throwing you right at them and running,” her knee just happened to slip a little early.

When they weren’t training, however, Clarke’s mind traveled to all she had left behind. She wondered how her mother was doing and how she would explain what had happened to Wells. She thought of her colleagues and other friends, wondering when or whether she would ever see them again. The inability to check in – to even look through old messages on her phone – made her feel isolated and anxious.

She had trouble sleeping at night, and when she saw the light on in Bellamy’s room under his doorframe, she knew he was having trouble too.

* * *

After their week of orientation, all four of the FBI handlers they were assigned arrived to take them to Shallow Valley. Bellamy and Clarke were already exhausted, and now had to deal with a big move and settling into their new lives.

When they landed at the airport in Montana, Lincoln stayed with Bellamy and Clarke while the other three disappeared. It wasn’t quite as hot as Arkadia was in mid-July, but Clarke was happy that it was at least warm in Montana – she would still be able to enjoy some of the summer weather. Ten minutes later, Roan pulled up in a dark blue mid-sized SUV.

“Meet your new ride,” he told them.

“What?” Bellamy responded in confusion. Arkadia was a bustling city with a strong public transportation system; he had only driven a car a handful of times.

Clarke, on the other hand, responded with “Sweet!” and raced to Roan to grab the keys.

“No way, Princess, there’s no way I’m letting you drive us in this death trap.”

“Deal with it, Bell. I have far more driving experience than you.”

“Since when?”

“Since I worked at that clinic in college and had to drive forty minutes each way three times a week.”

“Fine,” Bellamy conceded, rolling his eyes. “But you’re teaching me how it all works so I can drive myself too.”

Clarke nodded and looked around, wondering where Indra and Echo were. She got her answer a moment later, when they pulled up in a small moving truck that she guessed contained her and Bellamy’s belongings from Arkadia.

“We’ve been through everything in the truck and there’s nothing that should link you to your former identities, so you should be good,” Indra told them.

“Ok, so this is how this is going to work,” Roan announced, clearly already impatient. “We’re all going to travel to your new house. I’m coming as Clarke’s older cousin, who is helping with the move. Indra and Lincoln are going to play the movers, so remember that you don’t really know them at all.”

“And what about Echo?” Clarke asked.

“If all goes well, you won’t see me at all,” Echo replied with a wink.

“That’s comforting,” Bellamy added.

“Enough chit chat. We have more important work to do than babysitting you two. Let’s go,” Indra announced. They shuffled into their respective cars, with Clarke proudly sitting behind the wheel and adjusting the mirrors of her new car.

“So the house is what, twenty minutes or so from here?” Bellamy asked from the back seat (Roan had grabbed shotgun), scanning the horizon for a sign of their new town.

Roan chuckled and turned back to look at him.

“Try three hours.”

“ _What?!”_ both Bellamy and Clarke demanded.

“You’re not in Arkadia anymore, kids.”

* * *

After three hours of driving through basically nothing, Bellamy, Clarke, and Roan all let out a relieved sigh when they saw the sign welcoming them to Shallow Valley. Clarke slowed down the car as they entered the town and the trio surveyed their surroundings.

The road that had taken them from the airport transformed into the main street of the town. For about half a mile, the sides of the street were filled with small shops, restaurants, and professional offices for doctors, dentists, and lawyers. Small side streets led to a few other small businesses and quickly grew residential. Clarke passed the road they were supposed to turn on for their new house, but chose to keep going so they could continue their tour of the town. Even though they had already been in the car for three hours, Roan and Bellamy didn’t argue.

Clarke was happy to see real stores and people – _civilization,_ she thought – but she was surprised to see none of the chains she was used to in Arkadia. There were no fast food joints with their convenient drive-thrus. She didn’t even see a Starbucks, though she assumed there was one somewhere. She wasn’t on Mars, after all. She didn’t see any sign of a mall or a Target, but she hoped that there were shopping centers somewhere nearby, even just for a taste of something familiar.

After they drove slowly through the half-mile stretch of Shallow Valley, they came upon more nothing.

“I guess that’s it,” Bellamy announced.

“It’ll do,” Roan told them, before showing Clarke a spot where she could turn around.

This time, they turned on the small side street their directions had indicated. This street was entirely residential, with small houses situated somewhat close together on small, well-kept yards. Within a minute or two, they stopped in front of a two-story Craftsman house with a sizable, if somewhat dingy, front porch. Indra and Lincoln were already in the driveway with the moving truck, having not wasted time touring the town.

“Now remember,” Roan told them before they left the car, “Your new identities start _now_. We don’t know who could be watching or might stop by to say hello. There’s no going back now. You two have to pretend to be friends.”

They had talked about this extensively – they needed a believable explanation for why Clarke and Bellamy were moving across the country together and sharing a house. No one would believe it if they continued to treat each other with their current level of animosity. Indra had given them two believable options: they were best friends who had both been ready for a change and decided to move out here as some sort of “adventure,” or they were a couple who moved here because one of them got a dream job. Clarke and Bellamy quickly chose the first option. They were going to have enough trouble acting as friends – there was _no way_ they could pretend to be a couple.

Clarke took a deep breath and climbed out of the car. She turned to Bellamy with a clearly fake smile plastered on her face.

“Come on, Bell, our _adventure_ begins!” she declared sarcastically.

“Can’t wait!” he responded with similar fake enthusiasm.

Roan just shook his head, and Clarke was pretty sure she heard him mutter “ungrateful assholes” under his breath. Yeah, they probably had that coming.

The trio each grabbed something off of the moving truck and carried it inside. Roan went back out to keep unloading, but Bellamy and Clarke couldn’t help walking around their new house, surveying everything. The front porch led into a small foyer with a row of coat hooks and a staircase leading to the second level. To the right of the foyer was a cozy living room, and Clarke was excited to see a fireplace there, though she didn’t know if it still worked or not. Moving further into the house, they found a dining room and a small, but functional kitchen. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the kitchen in her apartment in Arkadia, with its updated appliances and counter space for days, but when Clarke saw the view from the window over the sink, which faced the back of the house, she felt her breath stop.

Mountains.

She stepped to the window and studied the view. Mountains, there in the window of her own home. She had seen them when they landed at the airport, of course, but somehow she never imagined that she would be able to see them from her own house.

She turned to Bellamy and it was clear he had noticed them too. They shared a brief moment of collective awe before Indra burst in with a box labeled “kitchen.”

Trying to stay out of her way, they headed back to the entryway to check out the upstairs. On the way back, Clarke also noticed a small, but clean powder room. Upstairs, they found two bedrooms of equal size, though one of them had a much larger closet. Clarke opened her mouth to claim it, but Bellamy just chuckled.

“Yes, Princess, you get the closet.”

There was also a full bathroom on the second floor, and Clarke was surprised and pleased to see it had two sinks. She was already sharing a house with Bellamy – she knew she couldn’t share a single sink with him.

The house had come furnished and Clarke and Bellamy had left their furniture behind, not knowing what would fit into their new house and not wanting to bother lugging it across the country. The furnishings of their new house looked comfortable, if a little lived in. The living room had a comfy sofa and a big overstuffed chair that Clarke thought looked perfect for reading or sketching. The dining room had a wooden table with four chairs, all of which had a few scratches, but nothing too noticeable. The kitchen was stocked with serviceable pots, pans, dishes, and silverware. The bedrooms each had a queen-sized bed and a dresser. Bellamy’s also had a small desk and chair, which couldn’t fit in Clarke’s given the large closet. She guessed immediately that they would have to add bookshelves to his room and her suspicions were confirmed when she saw four boxes labeled “Books” piled in his room and then heard Roan carrying a fifth one up the stairs, muttering something about how he was sure they had libraries in Shallow Valley and that this was just ridiculous.

In less than an hour, all of their belongings had been unloaded. Their family members had packed up the majority of their wardrobes, making Clarke happy she had gotten the bigger closet. Bellamy had obviously had a lot of his books sent too, and Clarke had explained to her mother where to find her painting and drawing supplies. Clarke had made a few requests for the kitchen, including her trusted coffee maker and blender. Her mother had packed a few more things for her that she hadn’t thought of in the flurry of activity that night, including her favorite throw blankets, some family photos, and her favorite movies and books (though far fewer than Bellamy had brought).

After unloading, Bellamy and Clarke met with Roan, Indra, and Lincoln in the living room. True to her word, Echo was nowhere to be seen. Indra had Clarke close the curtains to make sure no one could see in.

“We’ve run a second sweep on the house for bugs and you should be good,” Lincoln told them. “There are instructions for how to pay your rent, utilities, and other expenses on the dining room table. We’ve taken care of everything for the first six months, to give you some time to settle in, so don’t worry about those too soon.”

“We also have new electronic devices for you, with no traces of your previous identities,” Roan told them, handing them each a small pile of boxes. Clarke looked through hers – there was a new smartphone, a laptop, and a fitness tracker similar to the one she had grown reliant on in Arkadia (though she mainly used it to read text messages without pulling her phone out while at work). Bellamy also held a laptop and phone, but had a tablet in place of the fitness tracker, which she knew he typically used for work.

After they examined the electronics, Roan also passed over a stack of new identification documents, including drivers licenses, passports, and fake birth certificates. Clarke was impressed.

“So what happens now?” Bellamy asked.

There was a brief, awkward pause.

“Now… we leave,” Indra told them. “And you two start your lives here.”

“Just like that?” Clarke asked.

“Just like that,” Indra confirmed. “In your phones you have a contact for each of us, marked in code. You’ll remember the code because the first letter matches the first letter of our names. Roan is in there as Ronnie (Roan groaned at that), I am Isabel, Lincoln is Leonard, and Echo is Eleanor. You will call us by those names when you see us as well. There is also a contact in your phone marked ‘Home.’ This is an emergency line that will page all four of us and whoever is available will respond first. Use this if you see anything suspicious or if you need to get ahold of one of us urgently.”

Bellamy and Clarke nodded.

“How will we know when it is time to meet up with one of you for our monthly check-ins?” Clarke asked.

“We will text you, proposing lunch or a similar meeting,” Indra told them.

After a bit more discussion of the logistics, it was time to part ways. Indra and Lincoln climbed into the moving truck. Echo pulled up in a black sedan, posing as Roan’s girlfriend taking him back to the airport. Bellamy and Clarke said their goodbyes and watched the four agents depart from their new front porch.

When they were gone, the duo stood there for an additional moment.

“I guess this is it,” Clarke said.

Clarke expected some sort of sarcastic response, but instead found her same expression of apprehension on Bellamy’s face. Regardless of whether they could stand each other or not, they were in this together, and it didn’t really seem to dawn on them until that exact moment.

Clarke heard Bellamy take a deep breath.

“Well, let’s get to unpacking, Princess,” he said, before holding open the front door of their new house and entering after her.


	3. Settling In

Chapter 3: Settling In

Scrolling through the news on his phone as he waited for his bread to toast, Bellamy reached for his coffee mug, took a hearty gulp, and promptly spit it across the kitchen.

He had been living with Clarke for one week, and this was the _third_ time she had left a mug of paint water on the counter in the kitchen. He dumped it in the sink and rinsed his mouth out with a handful of fresh water.

“Clarke!” he called to the living room. “That’s the third time this week!”

There was a moment’s pause.

“Bellamy, watch out,” Clarke called back in a monotone voice. “I left a mug of paint water on the counter.”

Bellamy just rolled his eyes and reached for his toast, which had just popped.

“You’re cleaning the floor this time,” he called back.

“Fat chance,” she retorted, strolling into the kitchen and fetching herself a mug of actual coffee. “I’m not the one that spit water all over it like a child. Besides, I have a job interview in an hour and need to get ready.”

“At the hospital?”

“Yup. They conveniently have an opening for an emergency room doctor.”

“How much of a role do you think Indra played in that?” he asked with a smirk, sipping his coffee.

“Enough that I better not fuck up this interview,” Clarke replied. “Besides, I don’t know where I would work if this fell through. It’s not like there are any other hospitals around. Even as it is, this is a major step down from my previous job.”

“Yeah, next time maybe don’t watch someone get murdered.”

“Not so loud!” Clarke hissed, looking at the window.

“Easy, Princess. Neighbors can’t hear through walls.”

“Still, we should be careful.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes and went back to reading from his phone.

“Speaking of interviews, did the museum ever call you back?” Clarke asked after a few minutes.

“Let’s not call it a ‘museum,’ as if it even comes close to the place I worked in Arkadia. It’s a glorified town historical center.”

“Well, did the town historical center call you back?”

“Yup,” Bellamy replied. “I start on Monday.”

It was only Wednesday, which meant he had a few more days off.

“I’d say ‘congratulations,’ but you don’t sound all that enthused,” Clarke replied in a teasing voice.

“Let’s just say that you’re not the only one settling for a step down. I can’t believe I spent 8 years getting a PhD to end up working at the Shallow Valley Historical Society.”

“Well, maybe next time don’t watch somebody get murdered,” Clarke fired back as she finished her coffee and left the kitchen.

Bellamy raised his arm to flip her off, but she was already gone.

He did it anyway.

(Then he went to get the mop).

* * *

Clarke sat nervously in the small office, waiting for her interview to start. She knew she was qualified for this position – more than qualified, if she was being honest – but she still found herself nervous nonetheless. She had finished near the top of her class in med school, driven by the need to prove she had gotten there on merit, not just for her last name. When she graduated, she had her pick of the top hospitals in the country at which do to her residency and she chose Arkadia, not just to stay close to her family and friends, but also because of the hospital’s resources and reputation. She worked daily with doctors whose reputations she had grown up worshiping. They had one of the top-rated NICUs in the country. With virtually every tool she could ever need, every expert she could ever hope to consult, directly at her fingertips, Clarke went to work every day confident and eager to save lives.

It was a slightly different story in Shallow Valley. The lack of a parking garage was her first hint that this was a very different type (and size) of hospital. She had been given a brief tour of the ER prior to her interview and was trying to stay optimistic in spite of what she had seen. The waiting room was dingy and cold, staffed by nurses who were clearly overworked and stressed. The team of doctors wasn’t even a quarter of the size she was used to, and there were few expert specialists she could consult with on difficult cases. The equipment looked dated, the furniture worn.

Still, in spite of the nickname Bellamy had teased her with for nearly her whole life, Clarke viewed her surroundings not with disgust, but instead with interest and maybe even a trace of determination. This was a new challenge, and there was a chance she could really do some good here. Now she sat, anxiously awaiting her interview, and hoping that the Head of Surgery would like her.

Finally, the door opened, and a young man entered. The Head of Surgery she was supposed to be talking with was at least 60 – this couldn’t be him.

“Hi, I’m Dr. Jackson,” the young man introduced himself. “Dr. Nyko got called into an emergency surgery, so they sent me in to conduct your interview. I’m the lead in the Emergency Department right now, so we would be working closely together.”

Dr. Jackson was warm and welcoming, and Clarke felt her nerves slipping away within minutes.

The interview went well, with Dr. Jackson asking the typical interview questions and Clarke responding honestly and impressively. Towards the end, Jackson looked up from his notes and leaned back in his chair.

“So how did a top resident from Arkadia find herself out here?”

Clarke swallowed and quickly went through the answer she had rehearsed in her head again before speaking. This was the critical question – both to getting the job and to maintaining her new identity. Clarke and Bellamy had been surprised when Indra had included so much of their real lives in their fake backstories. Shouldn’t they have covered their tracks more thoroughly by picking a different city to claim they were from? Wouldn’t this provide an easy link if the Wallaces came looking for them? Indra had told them that the key to a clever lie was actually to lie as little as possible. She had rightly pointed out that if they claimed to be from somewhere else, like Polis, they wouldn’t be able to answer any follow-up questions accurately and could easily be found out. _Maintain as much of the truth as possible_ , she had told them. They would be honest about being from Arkadia, which was an enormous city and wouldn’t be unbelievable at all. They would lie about their previous places of employment, but choose fictions that closely resembled the facts. Clarke Griffin had been a resident at Arkadia General. Clarke _Smith_ had been a resident at Arkadia Memorial, and when HR went to check those records, they would be directed to Echo, who would pose as Clarke’s previous supervisor.

Indra had also pointed out that, if the Wallaces somehow tracked them to Shallow Valley, it really wouldn’t matter whether they had told anyone they were from Arkadia – at that point, they were most likely dead anyway.

A comforting thought.

Dr. Jackson cleared his throat and Clarke was immediately snapped back to the present.

“I got tired of the big city,” Clarke lied through her teeth. She _loved_ the city. “Wanted a change of scenery. My best friend had driven through this town when he was a kid and always had a lingering fondness for it, so one night, after a long conversation about how we were both feeling stuck and frustrated where we were, we started to scheme about moving here. By the next day, we had signed a lease on a house,” she finished with a fake chuckle.

“Sounds impulsive,” Jackson replied, but not with a real showing of concern.

“It does, but after that we made sure to do everything else responsibly. And, so far, it feels like the best decision we’ve ever made. The one thing I do miss, though, is my work, so I’m especially happy for this opportunity.”

“Well we’re thrilled to have someone with your experience joining our team,” Jackson told her, pushing back from the desk.

“When can you start?”

Clarke grinned.

* * *

“Is that champagne?” Bellamy asked when Clarke walked through the front door.

“Well, it’s the Shallow Valley version of champagne. It has bubbles and will get us drunk, I think,” she replied, examining the label with a skeptical eye.

“I take it the interview went well?”

“It did! I figured we could celebrate our newfound employment with some cheap bubbly hopefully-alcohol.”

Bellamy grinned and grabbed two mugs from their cupboard. They didn’t have any wine glasses, but these would work.

Clarke poured as she told him about the interview and her plans for starting training the following week.

“Cheers to nailing interviews that definitely weren’t pre-arranged for us by the government,” Bellamy offered, clinking his mug with Clarke’s.

“Here here!”

They both took a sip and instantly regretted it. Clarke’s face puckered and Bellamy spun around and spit his mouthful in the sink.

“So, that’s another lesson learned,” Clarke announced before pouring the rest of the bottle down the drain.

“Maybe it’s an acquired taste,” Bellamy offered.

“Let’s hope we’re not around long enough to find out,” Clarke replied, and Bellamy nodded in agreement.

After rinsing her mouth out with water, Clarke went outside to grab the mail, which she had forgotten to pick up when she got home from her interview. As she got to the mailbox, the neighbor’s door opened, and a young man exited, smiling when he saw Clarke.

“Finally, I get to meet the new neighbors!” he announced.

Clarke noticed that he looked about her age and was pretty good-looking overall. His hair was a bit floppy, but in a charming way, and his eyes sparkled with interest and maybe even a dash of mischief. Clarke smiled back and went to say hi.

“I’m Finn,” he told her, and Clarke introduced herself.

They chatted for a few moments, Clarke giving him her rehearsed backstory and mentioning her “best friend” Bellamy, who she now lived with. She made sure to portray their relationship as platonically as possible. For no reason.

“You guys should stop by sometime,” Finn told her. “We’re having a bonfire Saturday night and our friend Monty is bringing some of his homemade moonshine.”

_So very far from Arkadia_ , Clarke thought. Still, it would be nice to talk to people who didn’t actively hate her, so she agreed and told Finn she was looking forward to it.

Finn walked to his car after saying goodbye and Clarke watched him open his door. Right before he climbed in, he winked at her, and Clarke felt herself blushing. She quickly retreated to the house with the mail and told Bellamy about the party.

“I met the woman who lives there yesterday,” he told Clarke. “Raven’s her name. She mentioned a roommate – that must be who you met.”

Clarke nodded, thumbing through the junk mail intended for the home’s previous occupants, before throwing it all away.

* * *

The next day, Clarke had the opportunity to meet Raven herself as she lugged the trash can out to the curb. She hadn’t met the rest of the neighbors yet, but if Finn and Raven were any indication, she and Bellamy had ended up in a town of very attractive people.

Raven was tan and gorgeous, with her sleek dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. Clarke suspected it took nothing for her to look this good, and she would have resented her for it if not for the brilliant smile Raven flashed her.

“You must be Clarke!” she said, sticking out her hand to shake.

“Raven?” she asked, and Raven nodded in confirmation.

“How are you settling in?” Raven asked.

“It’s going pretty well! We’re almost unpacked and we’ve both found jobs, so we at least feel like adults [find something cooler to say there].”

The two continued to exchange pleasantries for a few moments, with Raven recommending her favorite local coffee shop (Grounders) and grocery store (Algae Depot) and Clarke trying furiously to remember everything.

Clarke was also trying to fish for more information on Finn, but didn’t want to make it obvious.

Finally, she found an in.

“I met your roommate,” Raven told Clarke. “Pretty cute.”

Clarke tried to refrain from vomiting in her mouth at the idea of someone calling Bellamy “cute” and remembered that they were supposedly best friends now.

“I met yours too,” Clarke replied, “and… you know, same.”

“Cute _and_ single,” Raven told her with a wink, and Clarke smiled.

“Good to know,” she told Raven.

A car beeped at the curb and Raven looked up.

“That’s my friend, Monty – I’ve got to go. But I’ll see you Saturday for the bonfire? I hear Finn invited you.”

“Yup!” Clarke told her with a smile, waving as Raven jumped in the car and left.

Maybe things were looking up after all.

* * *

On Saturday evening, Bellamy and Clarke waited until the sounds of the party next door were wafting into their own home to go over, not wanting to be awkwardly early.

When Clarke came down the stairs, Bellamy surveyed what she was wearing and snorted.

“What?” Clarke asked, looking over her outfit. “It’s a flannel shirt and jeans.”

“We’re in Montana, not some Lifetime movie set on a dude ranch,” Bellamy replied.

Clarke rolled her eyes and headed towards the kitchen.

“Are you going to wear your cowboy boots too?” Bellamy called after her. She raised her middle finger in reply. She grabbed the plate of cookies she had baked earlier that day and shoved the 6-pack of beer Bellamy had picked up at him before heading to the door, assuming correctly that he was following her.

As they approached the neighbor’s house, they could hear everyone in the backyard, so they followed the small stone path in that direction. Luckily, Raven spotted them quickly and started introducing them to everyone. 

“At least a quarter of these people are in flannel,” Clarke whisper-hissed to Bellamy.

“How many of them bought it at JCrew, though, do you think?”

“Oh shove it,” she muttered back, trying to make it look like playful banter between friends when in reality she just wanted to try out some of those moves Sinclair had taught her.

“This is Monty, the maker of the moonshine!” Raven announced, motioning to a young man who seemed rather shy… or maybe just high. Possibly a combination of the two.

“Want to try the latest batch?” Monty offered.

Bellamy politely declined, opening one of the beers he had brought instead. Clarke narrowed her eyes at her housemate, never one to back down from a challenge.

“Sure, I’d love some,” she announced to Monty. How bad could it be? It was liquor after all.

Bad, as it turned out. Really bad. She took a sip and immediately spit it across the yard. She was worried about appearing rude, but everyone just laughed, so she assumed that this wasn’t an infrequent occurrence.

“Princess can’t handle backcountry moonshine?” Bellamy asked mockingly.

“At least I tried it,” Clarke fired back with a biting glare.

“Geez,” Raven interjected. “I thought you two were best friends? Maybe you’ve just been cooped up in that house together for too long.”

“Something like that,” Clarke replied before taking a deep breath. They needed to sell this better.

“Half of our friendship is built on ripping on each other, but when push comes to shove we’re always on the same side,” Bellamy explained casually, throwing his arm over Clarke’s shoulders and pulling her into his chest. Clarke smiled in agreement, impressed by how quickly he had stepped into character. She almost would have believed it herself had he not intentionally flushed the toilet three separate times during her shower that morning, sending cascades of freezing water over her shoulders and back.

Raven nodded, getting distracted as she saw someone else walk into the backyard. She left Bellamy and Clarke to run and greet the new guest.

Bellamy started talking to Monty about his brewing process and Monty introduced them to his friend and roommate, Jasper, who was also clearly high. Clarke lost interest as they talked about stills and ingredients and began to look around for Finn. She didn’t come to the party for him. Seriously, she didn’t. She came to meet the neighbors and make friends so that she didn’t have to talk to her raging asshole of a roommate all the time. _But_ , if she happened to also get laid at the bonfire party, or even begin something that could become a relationship or at least a multiple-times-laid situation, that wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

“I’m going to drop the cookies off inside,” Clarke told the group, finding her out.

She did just that, finding room on the table between chips and some sort of potato salad. When she looked up, she found Finn closing the refrigerator and smiling at her. There were a few other people milling about, snacking and chatting.

“You made it!” he said, pulling her into a side hug. “Want a tour?”

She eagerly agreed and Finn started showing her around the house.

The layout was similar to the house she shared with Bellamy, though it was more spacious and felt more like a home. Clarke reflected that she and Bellamy hadn’t really settled in yet, both still thrown off by all of their sudden life changes. As Clarke appreciated the art on Finn’s walls and knick-knacks scattered here and there, she made a silent vow to do more that weekend to make her own house feel like home.

Finn showed her the entire downstairs before leading her to the steps. Clarke thought it was a bit odd that he paused to look around to see if anyone was following them, but she assumed he just didn’t want to shirk his hosting responsibilities. She followed him up the steps to a small landing. 

“That’s my roomate’s room,” he said, pointing to a bedroom clearly occupied by a woman, if the clothing scattered across the dresser and bed were any indication. _Must be Raven’s room_ , Clarke thought.

“And this is mine,” Finn gestured, but he didn’t open the door to it. Clarke would have found it odd, but he immediately ducked into a third room and Clarke followed.

“This is sort of an office that we share. It’s much more comfortable for sitting in,” he explained. Clarke surveyed the bookshelves and cluttered desk. Her mind stupidly went to Bellamy, and she banished him from her thoughts before the mental image of his scowl could ruin her good time.

She sat with Finn on a small, clearly old sofa arranged under the window in the office. Clarke noticed he had closed the door behind him, but she didn’t mind. She appreciated the privacy.

They talked for a while about where they were from (Clarke carefully reciting her rehearsed backstory) and what they did for jobs. Apparently Finn was out of work, but was writing a screenplay he was very confident about. As he told her about it, he rested his left arm on the back on the sofa and started to toy with the loose strands of hair that had escaped her messy bun.

Clarke tried to pay attention to his description of his screenplay, she really did. But it sounded so convoluted and boring, and his eyes were so blue, and his mouth was so close, and, well, she assumed there would be plenty of time later to hear about the screenplay.

Apparently Finn felt the same way, because he stopped mid-sentence and leaned in and kissed her.

The kiss started off slow. Finn wove his hand through her hair and cupped the back her neck, and she sighed at how nice it felt to be held like this. He started to deepen the kiss and Clarke went along with it, though she was a bit turned off by how sloppy it was. It started to feel like he was trying to eat her face. She pulled back a bit and tried to get them back to their earlier rhythm, but Finn was all in, and kept pulling her back for more. Her mind scrambled to think of an exit strategy or a way to make the kiss better.

She was saved, however, by a very clear “Ahem.” Clarke looked up and saw Raven standing in the doorway. Clarke smiled at the young woman, but Finn pulled away sharply, as if he had been stung. Clarke looked at him, confused.

“Care to explain what’s going on here?” Raven asked, clearly mad as hell.

Clarke looked from Raven to Finn, confused.

“Were we not supposed to be in the office?” she asked, trying to figure out what was going on. “I thought you were fine with this – you sounded like you had no problem with me showing interest in your roommate.”

Raven scoffed, crossing her arms and glaring at Clarke.

“My roommate, Harper, not my _boyfriend_. Or ex-boyfriend now, as it were.”

Finn sprang from the couch and grabbed her arms gently, trying to placate her. Clarke looked from Raven, to Finn, to the woman’s bedroom visible across the hallway, and suddenly put the pieces together.

“You were talking about a different roommate,” she said quietly.

“Obviously, genius,” Raven shot back. “Now get out while I figure out how to deal with this piece of trash,” she said, gesturing to the helpless-looking Finn.

Clarke didn’t need to be told twice. She quickly made her way out of the room and down the stairs. She ran out the front door and across the yard to her own house, grateful she had kept her purse and house keys with her. She raced through her door and slammed it behind her, dropping her purse on the stairs and collapsing onto the sofa in the living room.

She enjoyed the silence of the house for a long moment, before deciding she better at least text Bellamy to give him a heads up in case he wanted to leave too.

**Clarke**

Hey, so remember that roommate I met who I thought was into me? Turns out he’s Raven’s boyfriend. Or now ex-boyfriend, I guess? Anyway, I’ll explain everything later but I’m home now and you might want to leave soon in case Raven takes her wrath out on everyone I’ve ever known, which unfortunately includes you.

**Bellamy**

I wondered why she looked so pissed. We can all hear her shouting at Finn inside, but it’s mainly in Spanish, so no one can work out what she’s saying. You make friends quick, Princess.

**Clarke**

Oh shut up.

**Bellamy**

No, seriously, this has to be a world record. Fastest Alienation of All Potential Social Contacts: Clarke Griffin.

**Clarke**

You do remember that I’m the only one who brought house keys with me, right?

…Pause…

**Bellamy**

Have I told you how good you look in flannel?

Clarke rolled her eyes, but left the door unlocked. She went upstairs to brush her teeth, eager to get all traces of Finn off of her.

When she came downstairs, she heard Bellamy letting himself in. She was surprised – she had only left a few minutes earlier. Then, she heard the yelling coming from next door.

“How bad is it?” she asked Bellamy.

“Well, Raven ended the bonfire early and is currently throwing all of his possessions out the second story windows and onto the yard, so pretty bad.”

Clarke winced.

“The good news is that it sounds like you didn’t destroy some perfect relationship. Based on what I could decipher reaching back to my high school Spanish training, this is the fourth time she has caught Finn with his tongue in some other girl’s mouth. So at least there’s that.”

“I guess that makes me feel mildly better,” Clarke replied.

“I’d still avoid Raven for a bit, though,” Bellamy warned. “I would not want to be on the receiving end of that temper.”

As if on cue, the pair heard a giant crash coming from next door, as well as a belated shout “That’s my car!”

“Yeah, I think I’ll just lay low for the time being,” Clarke agreed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't help a bit of Finn-bashing... forgive me!


	4. Friends New and Old

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the feedback and kudos! I'm having a lot of fun with this story - it's a good escape from the actual show (sigh).

Clarke was easily able to avoid Raven (and everyone else) for the next week as she settled into her routine at her new job. She worked 12-hour shifts on Monday and Tuesday, slept through all of Wednesday, and did an overnight on Thursday that ended up encapsulating most of Friday, too, when a brawl at a local bar Thursday night resulted in a number of bulky, tough-looking patients who turned out to be total babies when Clarke pulled out her needle to stitch them up.

She liked her work and it felt nice to get back to something familiar after so much had changed in her life. Reading charts, taking temperatures, adjusting fluids, looking at x-rays – here was a space where she could compartmentalize.

It was Friday afternoon now and her shift was officially over in two hours, she noted with a yawn.

“Dr. Smith,” she heard someone call in the distance. She looked at her phone, checking her email – not that she ever got any emails anymore, having changed her entire identity, but it was still a habit.

“Dr. Smith,” she heard again, and she rolled her eyes at whatever doctor wasn’t answering.

“Dr. Smith!” she heard, a bit more urgently, and looked up to see Jackson walking towards _her_.

Oh, yeah, she was Dr. Smith now.

“Oh, so sorry about that!” Clarke answered, flustered.

Jackson looked annoyed, but didn’t have time to comment on it. “You’re needed in Room 5 – the patient tore his stitches again.”

Clarke rolled her eyes.

“Skull tattoo or snake?”

“Snake.”

“That’s the third time he has pulled out his stitches,” Clarke muttered, heading back to his room with a scowl.

* * *

When her shift ended, Clarke drove her car home and parked it on the street in front of their house. She gathered her things with a yawn and stepped out, locking the car behind her and stretching her arms up. It was 4:00, giving her just enough time to pass out for an hour or two before figuring out dinner. She trudged up the cracked sidewalk to their front door, not even looking up until she got to the steps.

She jumped back in surprise – Raven was sitting on their front porch, her arms crossed.

Really? She had to show up today of all days, when Clarke was so exhausted she had no chance of defending herself?

Clarke considered her options. She could sit down and talk to Raven. She could go into her house and pretend she didn’t see her and just go to bed. She could fake a heart attack and collapse on the yard and hope that Raven just left her for dead. She could go back to her car and drive back to Arcadia and just let the Wallaces kill her.

Raven narrowed her eyes, and that last option got a lot more appealing.

It was time to face the music, though, and Clarke dropped onto the dilapidated swing next to the angry Latina.

“She lives,” Raven announced sarcastically, raising an eyebrow.

Clarke chuckled to herself and stretched her arms above her head. “I guess you could say that.”

“Were you planning on just avoiding me forever?”

“Could you blame me? I didn’t exactly make the best first impression,” Clarke replied, burying her face in her hands.

Raven snickered and Clarke looked up. It turned out to be contagious and within seconds both girls were laughing hard.

“So that’s one way to make friends,” Raven told her.

“Yeah next time I think I’ll stick to baking cookies and discussing the weather.”

There was a moment’s pause before Raven spoke again.

“I know you didn’t know he was my boyfriend. Bellamy explained everything to me yesterday.”

Clarke was surprised by this, but figured Bellamy probably wanted this whole thing to blow over as badly as she did, so she got it.

“Bellamy’s a good friend,” she said in response, trying to sound sincere.

“And good at… other things,” Raven said quietly with a smirk, causing Clarke’s jaw to drop.

“You two?”

“Yeah, last night. Just for fun – I just needed a distraction,” Raven told her. “Have you two ever…”

“NO!” Clarke shouted, trying not to gag, before remembering she was supposed to be playing the part of his best friend. “I mean, we’ve always just been really close friends. Never more than that. Never _anything_ ever more than that,” she finished firmly.

Raven looked skeptical, but accepted it with a shrug. “Whatever you say. You’re missing out though – he was fantastic.”

“After the brief make-out I had with Finn, I’m guessing you deserved some talent in that area,” Clarke said carefully, testing the waters.

Raven roared with laughter. “Girl, you’re telling me. He was the world’s _worst_ kisser.”

“Why were you even with him?” Clarke asked.

“Just got too comfortable, I guess,” Raven began. “We’ve known each other since we were kids – we lived on the same street and I used to get off the bus at his place after school and hang out there until my parents got home from work. He felt like family. We started dating in high school and had a few periods of on-again-off-again, but I thought we were finally settling down. I mean, we were living together and everything.”

“Bellamy said you mentioned that this wasn’t the first time Finn did something like this,” Clarke questioned.

“Yeah, I’ve caught him cheating twice and there were a couple of other times where I suspected it too. But in each case, I was able to just sort of justify it away. I think this was the one that just blew it up, though. I mean, it was _in my own house while I was there_!” Raven finished, throwing her arms in the air.

“It’s a bold move,” Clarke agreed.

The two laughed quietly.

“Did he tell you about his shitty screenplay?” Raven asked, and they were off again.

They talked for the next hour, at first roasting Finn but then also moving on to other topics. Clarke learned that Raven worked in IT for a local company, but that she was bored with the work and looking for something more challenging. She had dreamed of becoming an astronaut as a kid, but a car accident in high school left her with permanent nerve damage in her left leg. She didn’t let it get her down, though, and she excitedly told Clarke about the coding projects she was working on in her spare time, including an app that would help trauma victims with physical therapy exercises.

Shortly after 5:00, the two heard a throat clear and looked up to see Bellamy. The town historical center was only a few blocks away, so he typically walked to and from work, letting Clarke use the car for her longer commute.

Clarke looked quickly between Raven and Bellamy, wondering how awkward it would be after their hook-up, but neither of them seemed phased.

“I better head home and figure out dinner,” Raven announced after exchanging pleasantries.

“Or Bellamy could make us both grilled cheese sandwiches,” Clarke suggested, turning to Bellamy with pleading eyes. “Please, Bell, I had the _longest_ day.”

Bellamy rolled his eyes, about to refuse, but then Clarke got an idea.

She turned to Raven.

“Bellamy makes the best grilled cheese sandwiches, and he always makes one for me when I have a bad day. It’s one of the main reasons why he is my best friend in the universe.” When she spoke the last words, she turned to him with a smirk.

[The truth was that Bellamy _did_ make the best grilled cheese sandwiches in the world, but that he was also the world’s stingiest cook and never voluntarily made them for his sister, let alone his sister’s best friend who he couldn’t stand. One time, Octavia and Clarke waited until he had cooked two and Octavia pretended to fall down the front steps, screaming in pain, while Clarke snuck in and grabbed the sandwiches, sneaking them up to Octavia’s room. By the time Bellamy had returned to the kitchen to find his empty plate, the girls were gorging on his efforts behind a locked door. He had _not_ been amused.]

“Always happy to brighten your day, Princess,” Bellamy replied between gritted teeth before heading in the door to make the sandwiches.

“With tomato soup if it’s not too much trouble!” Clarke shouted after him.

“It’s awesome that you two are so close,” Raven told her, and Clarke made herself nod as if it were true. “It has to be hard being so far away from your family and other friends.”

“It is, but at least we have each other,” Clarke responded with mock sincerity, before hearing Bellamy slam a pan down on the stove inside.

* * *

Bellamy was out for a run two days later when he heard his phone ding. This being a pretty rare occurrence nowadays, he slowed to a stop and pulled it out of his pocket.

**Leonard**

Hey, Bellamy! It’s been forever and I’d love to hear how you’re settling into your new place. Want to meet for lunch today?

Bellamy’s heart started racing, knowing that this meant he would soon have a chance to check in with his sister. He quickly replied, agreeing and asking for details. He had intended to run a few more miles, but now turned back to the house so he could shower and meet “Leonard” in time.

An hour and a half later, Bellamy walked into Vera’s Café and spotted Lincoln sitting at a small booth in the back. Lincoln waved to him as if they were old friends.

Bellamy sat down and Lincoln offered him a menu.

“So are we going to actually like sit here and eat lunch?” Bellamy asked quietly, pretending to look at the specials.

“We are because I’m starving and Vera’s pot roast sandwich is legendary,” Lincoln replied.

“So you’re using me for a good meal on the FBI’s dime?”

“Pretty much.”

Bellamy couldn’t argue with that.

Over what turned out to be incredibly delicious pot roast sandwiches, Bellamy and Lincoln chatted and caught each other up. Lincoln asked about their new jobs and the house. Bellamy filled him in and told him the embarrassing story about Clarke and Finn, which made Lincoln chuckle.

At the end of their lunch, Lincoln passed Bellamy a small metal tin, explaining “Mom just had to send you some of her peanut butter fudge,” though Bellamy knew that the tin contained two phones, rather than anything edible. Still, he would take a phone call to Octavia over anything right now.

After lunch, the two men shook hands and went their separate ways. Bellamy waited until he was safely home to open the tin and, sure enough, he found two phones in it. They were old flip phones with no internet capabilities – that would help to ensure they weren’t tracked.

Bellamy flipped open the first one and checked the contacts. There were three names: Abby, Octavia, and Wells. His eyes hesitated on “Octavia” for a moment, but he knew this was Clarke’s phone, so he closed it and opened the other one. Clarke was at work, but would be home in a few hours.

He had hoped that, by only choosing two contacts, he would actually get 30 minutes with each, but Lincoln had let him know that this wasn’t the case. Still 20 minutes per person.

Bellamy couldn’t wait another minute. He dialed the number for Octavia and waited, his heart pounding.

“Hello?” Just hearing Octavia’s voice brought a new sense of calm to Bellamy.

“Hey there,” he replied. Immediately, he heard Octavia squeal loudly on the other line and he actually had to hold the phone away from his head for a moment.

The siblings caught up quickly, knowing they only had 20 minutes. Bellamy had set a timer on his other phone when he dialed, so he would know when to wrap things up.

He told her about his new job, the house, and their neighbors (leaving out his hook-up with Raven… this was his sister, after all). Octavia caught him up on her business (she ran her own yoga/judo studio) and gave him a few updates on his friends.

“Were they suspicious when I disappeared?” he asked.

“At first, but after a couple of questions they just sort of moved on,” Octavia told him, as blunt as always. It seems Indra was right.

“How are you and Clarke getting along?” she asked.

Bellamy let out a groan.

“I honestly do not know how you have been friends with this girl for 18 years. It hasn’t even been a month and I’m ready to strangle her.”

“Well, to be fair, you were ready to strangle her before you moved in with her.”

That was true.

“Just tell me you’re not being an asshole to her,” Octavia pressed.

“ _I’m_ not the asshole here!” Bellamy shouted, defending himself.

“You always turn into a 12 year old boy around her, pulling her pigtails and slipping worms into her shoes.”

“The worm thing was ONE TIME,” Bellamy fired back. “And anyway, we only have two and a half minutes left, let’s spend it discussing something more pleasant.”

Octavia agreed with a laugh and the two caught up more, Octavia telling him a funny story about her students. Bellamy barely heard the words. He just tried to absorb the sound of her voice, knowing he wouldn’t hear it again for a month.

When there were thirty seconds left, they started their goodbyes.

“I’ll talk to you in a month,” Bellamy promised, “And I’ll hopefully see you soon. I love you, O.”

“I love you too, big brother. I’ll hold down the fort for you here. Don’t worry about me – everything is great here. And be nice to-”

The phone cut out, and Bellamy took that as a sign that the universe meant for him to ignore that advice.

His next call was to Miller. He had to spend the first ten minutes of the call describing the murder he witnessed because Octavia’s version of events hadn’t satisfied Miller’s curiosity. Miller asked him about his new job and the town and Bellamy asked about their friends back home. It was a much more superficial conversation than the one he had had with Octavia, but he didn’t mind. It just felt great to talk to an actual friend.

There were three minutes left when Miller asked him “so how many times have you hooked up with Clarke?”

Bellamy stuttered on the question for a second.

“What the hell did you just ask me?”

“You and the Princess. How many times?”

“Don’t make me gag,” Bellamy replied.

“Oh, so we’re still doing that thing where you pretend like you’re not ass backwards crazy about her?” Miller asked with a laugh.

“Why did I even put you on my contact list?” Bellamy asked, rubbing his temples. “You should know better than anyone that she is the bane of my existence.”

“I know better than anyone that you are living in a serious state of denial. And you put me on your contact list because I’m one of the few people who can stand your pathetic ass.”

“Thank God I only have to talk to you once a month,” Bellamy fired back, though he was smiling now.

“Yeah yeah, get back to that roommate you definitely aren’t obsessed with.”

Miller hung up when there were still 45 seconds left on the call.

* * *

A few hours later, Bellamy was sitting at the table filling in the crossword in the local newspaper. It wasn’t as challenging as the one he was used to, but it was still a part of his daily routine that he enjoyed maintaining. That is, when he could get to the newspaper before Clarke. One day the week before she had filled in every box of the crossword with B E L L A M Y B L A K E I S A L O S E R repeated until she ran out of spaces. Bellamy was spiteful for days.

He heard keys in the front door and knew Clarke was home. She had just gotten off of a 12-hour shift, which meant she would be in what Bellamy called “bear mode.” The best course of action for a roommate was to provide food and back away slowly.

“I made chicken parm for dinner – there’s a plate for you in the fridge,” he called out before gathering up his paper and heading towards his room.

Clarke thanked him sleepily and headed for the kitchen.

“Oh, and one more thing,” Bellamy told her, returning with her burner phone. “I had a fun lunch with ‘Leonard’ today – here’s your phone for the month. I talked to Octavia and Miller earlier. They’re both doing well and both said to tell you hi.”

Clarke’s face morphed into an excited smile, regardless of how tired she was, when Bellamy placed the phone in her hands.

“There is no way Miller said to tell me hi.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sure he would have if we had had more time.”

“Sure, I bet,” Clarke replied with a small eyeroll.

She looked at the phone while stifling an enormous yawn.

“I’ll probably wait until tomorrow to call,” she told Bellamy, turning to her dinner plate instead.

“Yeah, I don’t think your mother would ever forgive you if you fell asleep midway through your only 20 minute phone call,” Bellamy replied with a chuckle.

He found himself returning to the table as Clarke set the microwave to heat up her dinner. As long as he didn’t poke the bear… maybe he’d survive.

“Is it bad that I’m actually sort of appreciating the forced lack of contact with her?” Clarke asked. “Yes, that’s bad. God, I’m a terrible daughter.”

Bellamy leaned back with his arms behind his head. “If it was anyone else, I’d say that’s pretty bad, but with Abby Griffin, I think 20 minutes per month sounds just about right.”

Clarke flashed him a smile and grabbed her plate as the microwave beeped before joining him at the table.

They chatted amicably for the next twenty minutes as Clarke ate her dinner and Bellamy finished the crossword. Sure, she tried to sabotage his efforts by making bogus suggestions, but she also complimented his cooking, so Bellamy was going to record this night as a win.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm having too much fun with the "enemies" portion of enemies to friends to lovers. Maybe I'll just keep them here - jk jk don't leave me
> 
> I think it will be two weeks before the next chapter, but it depends on how much writing time I get next week. The next chapter is turning out longer than I expected, but it's a funny one!


	5. The Delinquents Do Pub Trivia

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the comments and kudos! It really makes my day and encourages me to keep writing this story. I'm having a lot of fun with it!
> 
> This chapter brought to you by how much I miss pub trivia.

Chapter 5 The Delinquents Do Pub Trivia

After Clarke cleared the air with Raven, both Bellamy and Clarke found themselves spending most of August (when they weren’t working) with their new group of friends. There were Raven and Harper (the “ _roommates_ ,” as Bellamy liked to call them around Clarke, just to constantly remind her of her mix-up with Finn), and Monty and Jasper. Other friends appeared too, including Monroe, Fox, and occasionally a guy named Dax, who no one really seemed to like, but who Jasper claimed sold really good pot. Weekend bonfires continued (with far less drama), but the friends’ main event was definitely their pub trivia every Tuesday.

The bar where they did trivia was called The Dropship. For some reason, when Clarke first heard the name, she pictured a club like the ones she went to in the city: flashing lights, fog machines, a DJ playing music so loud she actually worried about the state of her eardrums, and overpriced trendy drinks sold in test tubes.

The reality was a little different. The Dropship was a small, dirty bar in the center of town. Booths lined the walls, each one boasting duct tape covering up some sort of tear in the fabric. There were two pool tables and dartboards, but clearly the main appeal of the place was the pub trivia. It seemed like half of Shallow Valley turned out for it each week, and Jasper typically had to get there by 3:00 just to reserve their table. It was insanely competitive, with the first prize team winning a $50 bar credit each week. 

Each member of their team had their specific strengths. Raven knew everything scienc-y, and she and Monty both covered math and engineering as well. Harper was their pop culture goddess. Jasper had comic books down. Monroe had an insane knowledge of geography, and Fox’s musical memory was legendary. Dax was their sports guy, though Harper knew a good deal of that too. Clarke brought human anatomy to the table, but Bellamy’s historical prowess was clearly the more valuable addition when the pair joined the group.

The real highlight of trivia at the Dropship, however, was the trivia master, who was also the lead bartender: John Murphy. Murphy and his girlfriend Emori owned and operated the bar, serving as the only two bartenders at all times. Even when the place was insanely busy, only the two stood behind the bar, and they had the nerve to _take their time_. So strong was the local loyalty to the place, however, that if any patron dared to complain about the wait, they were typically stared down by the rest of the customers until they felt too intimidated to stay.

When Murphy did trivia, he asked the questions with such biting sarcasm that the dialogue itself became part of the entertainment. Sometimes he would just stop midway through a round to go help Emori out at the bar, leaving everyone hanging and not caring at all. Trivia lasted anywhere from ninety minutes to four hours, depending on what kind of mood Murphy was in and how many questions he came up with for that week. He decided the correct answers, and there was no challenging him (though Clarke swears he was wrong once).

At least twice a night, he would also sneak in a question about Emori that no one ever knew the answer to. “What was the name of Emori’s second grade teacher?” “What kind of dog bit Emori’s brother when she was ten?” He never gave out the answers to these either, so you just had to assume you would miss those ones.

On paper, trivia night at the Dropship sounded like an absolute disaster, but in person, it was _addicting_. Clarke always tried to get Tuesday night off, offering to swap literally any shift, including an overnight, for it. Luckily, few of her coworkers were as into trivia as she was, so she was usually able to make it work.

* * *

On this particular Tuesday, Clarke was waiting impatiently downstairs for Bellamy to finish getting ready. They weren’t late and Jasper had their table saved, but Clarke was anxious to get to Dropship nonetheless. The week before, they had missed out on first place by _three points_. They were down Harper and Monroe, and had suffered for it. This week, the team was supposed to be at full strength, and Clarke just knew they were going to win. 

“Are you ready yet?” Clarke called up the stairs, annoyance clear in her voice.

“No, just as I wasn’t the last fifteen times you asked!” Bellamy shouted back.

“Are you just staying up there to drive me insane?”

There was a pause.

“It’s like 40% that,” Bellamy replied honestly.

“God I hate you so much,” Clarke shouted back.

She would have murdered him, but she knew they needed his historical knowledge. She stomped back to the couch and pulled out her phone to kill time. Without any social media, though, there wasn’t much to do. Within thirty seconds, she was back at the foot of the stairs.

“How about now?” she shouted.

Luckily, this time she was greeted by footsteps as Bellamy came jogging down the stairs.

“Ok, Princess, let’s go win that bar tab.”

“Finally,” she muttered.

When they walked in, Clarke headed to their table and Bellamy went to get them drinks. Murphy was still mad at Clarke for contesting an answer two weeks earlier, so she had no chance of getting served. She found Jasper, Monty, and Harper at the table, anxiously surveying the competition. The place was packed.

“Where’s Raven?” Clarke asked

“On her way – she had to pick up Monroe. Fox and Dax cancelled,” Monty told her.

“Are you kidding me? There goes our music round,” Clarke muttered.

Bellamy arrived with their beer and Clarke caught him up on who they were missing for the night. When they turned back to the table, they caught Harper kissing Monty on the cheek. They had been dating for a few weeks now.

“Could have been you if you had picked the right roommate,” Bellamy whispered to her. Clarke elbowed him in the ribs and shot him a glare. She didn’t need anyone else pointing out to him that Harper was a catch and that she had missed out. She seemed happy with Monty, though, so Clarke wasn’t actually sure she had had much of a chance to begin with.

She took her drink from Bellamy and made more room for him on their bench. Sitting so close to him still felt weird, but they both agreed that they needed to really sell this “best friends” act, and their normal habit of staying as far away from each other as possible during social outings seemed like it would cause suspicion.

Keeping up the ruse was admittedly still difficult, even after living in Shallow Valley for close to two months. Clarke usually had to bite her tongue to keep from launching her typical barbed comments at him and she could tell that Bellamy faced the same struggle. Sometimes they texted each other the insults if they became too tempted. A few times they had slipped, but their friends seemed to assume that the teasing banter was part of their friendship, so as long as Clarke kept the “stop hitting on that girl who’s so far out of your league she’d reject you from a coma” to texts instead of aloud, she was pretty sure their cover would remain safe.

Raven and Monroe walked in a few minutes later and Jasper went up to the bar for a fresh round for everyone. Monty picked up their quiz book and wrote their team name – “The Delinquents” – at the top of it.

Murphy seemed to sense that this was an important night. The place was packed and tension was thick in the air. Each team seemed to be sizing up the others. Trivia was supposed to start at 7:00, but tonight Murphy toyed with them, walking up to the microphone at 6:57, then walking back to the bar to pour a few drinks (you could hear the entire bar collectively hold their breath and then groan in disappointment). Finally, at 7:10, he left Emori to finish up with the remaining customers and carried his spiral notebook, where he kept all of his questions carefully written by hand, to the microphone.

You could always tell if someone was new to trivia night if they kept talking when Murphy got to the mic. That happened with a couple of people tonight, but they quickly quieted when they noticed the eerie silence of the rest of the bar.

“The first round is on water. It will have nine questions.”

 _Water, water,_ Clarke thought. _That could go in so many directions_. And it did.

“At what temperature does water freeze, in both Fahrenheit and Celsius?”

Monty wrote the answers down quickly.

“Technically, scientists are now discovering that supercooling can delay the freezing process until colder temperatures are reached,” Raven started to whisper, but Harper cut her off with a glare.

Murphy had noticed, though.

“I’m not accounting for supercooling, Reyes,” he announced into the microphone, even though there was no way he could have heard what she actually said.

“Second question,” he began. “Name two rivers in Montana that flow from South to North.”

“That’s not a question,” Clarke muttered, but she was still grateful when Monroe reached for the answer booklet and wrote down “Bighorn” and “Little Bighorn.”

There were six more questions, ranging from scientific questions about water’s properties to questions about water’s role in different religions and even one question on the 2017 movie _The Shape of Water._ The team felt like they did alright overall.

Finally, it was time for the last question of the round, which was typically significantly harder than the earlier ones. This one was no exception.

“During what period did all of the water on Earth arrive in comets and asteroids?” Murphy asked.

Clarke watched teams around the room shake their heads, incredulous that anyone could have a shot at this one.

Raven just rolled her eyes.

“Obviously the LHB,” she said to Monty. Even he didn’t know what she was talking about, however, and passed her the answer booklet.

“Late Heavy Bombardment,” Raven informed the group as she wrote. “Roughly 4 billion years ago.”

“Ohhh, that bombardment,” Jasper replied sarcastically, taking a large swig of his drink.

Raven was definitely the MVP of this round.

The Delinquents answered two more rounds of questions over the next hour. Murphy’s pace tonight felt pretty normal, in that it was entirely unpredictable. There was a fifteen-minute gap between the first and second rounds, and then he stopped again after the second question in that round to take a call on his phone. The second round had been pretty easy for the group, as it featured a combination of popular culture and movie trivia, meaning that Harper and Jasper were in their element. The third round was a killer. It featured _four_ Emori questions, which was just spiteful on Murphy’s part, and had a spelling portion. Even with all of their brains at work, they couldn’t decide on how to spell “sacrilegious.”

Murphy declared halftime after the first three rounds, so the team knew they had some time to kill. Emori typically tabulated scores at this point, and with this many teams, they had at least 30 to 45 minutes before the next round.

Monroe headed to the bar for the next round and Jasper twitched irritably.

“I don’t like taking breaks,” he said. “I want trivia! I want questions! And there were only like four in that first half that I even knew.”

Harper patted his back, trying to hide her chuckle.

“Ok, Jasper, want us to ask you comic book questions?” Bellamy asked, pulling out his phone to look up some questions.

“No, no, I always do those,” Jasper said dismissively. He thought for a moment, stood up, seemed to count people, then sat down. Then he stood up again, counted again, and sat back down. Everyone stared at him, confused.

“I’ve got it,” he announced proudly. “Mini Friend Trivia, right here, right now,” he declared.

“Friends the show? I’ll smoke you,” Harper (rightfully) declared.

“No, real friends. Like the newlywed game but with friends,” Jasper explained.

Now Harper’s eyes lit up. “I love it!” she squealed. “Who are the teams?”

“Me and Monty,” Jasper declared, “obviously.” Monty nodded, accepting that he really didn’t have a choice in this.

“Who else? Raven and Harper?” Clarke asked.

“Not fair, we’ve only known each other for six months,” Harper pouted, and Raven agreed.

“And Monroe is really only close with Fox. She and I have known each other for years, but in a casual way,” Raven explained.

The group turned to Bellamy and Clarke.

Clarke knew what they were thinking immediately, and immediately started protesting.

“No, no, I don’t think we’re quite up for that,” she began to say, but Jasper was already running with it. Bellamy just still looked confused.

“Ok, Monty and Jasper vs Clarke and Bellamy,” Raven declared with a smirk. “Harper, Monroe, and I will write the questions.” Monroe arrived with the drinks as Raven announced this and they quickly caught her up to speed.

The trio retreated to a corner of the bar with a stack of napkins to write their questions on.

“This is ridiculous,” Bellamy muttered to Clarke.

“I know. We’ll just have to get through it. Exactly how much truth are we telling here?” she asked.

Bellamy considered for a minute.

“Let’s go with Indra’s rules. We tell the truth as much as possible, but obviously bend it at times to cover up the fact that we, you know,”

“Hate each other? Have wanted to kill each other for roughly 18 years?” Clarke filled in.

“Yeah, that. See, look at us, already finishing each other’s sentences. We’ve got this,” Bellamy replied, bumping her elbow with his.

After five minutes or so, Raven, Harper, and Monroe returned, looking immensely pleased with themselves.

“Ok ladies and gentlemen,” Raven began, “here are the rules. We have eight questions. With each one, you will answer for yourself _and_ for your friend. When your answers match, your team gets a point. The team with the most points at the end of the eight questions wins.”

“What do we win?” Bellamy asked.

“The winning team gets an order of smothered cheese fries,” Monroe explained. This was serious business now.

Everyone agreed to the terms, napkin stacks and pens were distributed, and soon it was time for the first question.

“What is your go-to comfort food after a hard day? And your friend’s?” Harper asked.

Clarke took a minute to think. Hers was easy, though she doubted Bellamy knew it. What was his go-to? Suddenly, she knew. Doritos.

She was right, and Bellamy surprisingly got her ultra-specific answer right as well (Ben and Jerry’s Milk and Cookies ice cream). Monty and Jasper both got it right too (Lucky Charms cereal for both of them), so the teams were tied 2-2.

“First pet your friend ever owned?”

This one was easy. She wrote down the name of her beloved hamster and then scribbled her snarky reply for Bellamy.

Bellamy missed this one, naming the dog she had in middle school, which still impressed Clarke.

“Who the fuck is Kiki?” he asked, looking at her answer.

“Kiki the hamster, who was my best friend for three months in first grade until I decided she would be happier living in the wild. She enjoyed the yard until a hawk grabbed her.”

“Bleak,” Monroe replied.

Clarke shrugged her shoulders.

“I was seven. It was a hamster. Trust me, my therapists found far more things to spend time on.”

“Well what was Bellamy’s first pet?” Raven asked.

“Bellamy has owned zero pets because they are, and I quote, “Expensive, annoying, and a waste of resources,” Clarke answered with a flourish.

The group was stunned when Bellamy turned his napkin to show the group his answer.

“None. Pets are expensive, annoying, and a waste of resources,” he had written.

“It’s like they share a brain,” Jasper despaired.

“More like I have had to listen to him tell his sister that approximately 800 times,” Clarke answered.

In spite of her impressive answer, Monty and Jasper both got that one right, so they were now down 4-3.

They caught up over the next few questions, though. All four knew each other’s middle names. When asked to name the other’s biggest pet peeve, Clarke was the only one of the four to guess it correctly (historical inaccuracies, particularly in blockbuster movies), which brought the score to 6-6. Bellamy and Clarke briefly took the lead in the next question (biggest fear: snakes for Bellamy and serial killers for Clarke – an answer that launched a ten-minute discussion of Clarke’s favorite dateline shows), but Monty and Jasper bounced right back with “favorite show to binge.” Finally, after six of eight questions, Monty and Jasper were up by one point, with the score standing 9 to 8.

“Two questions left!” Raven announced. “And we’re ending things on a high note. What’s the best thing your best friend has ever done for you.”

Clarke thought for a moment, but when she realized her answer she smiled. But what was the best thing she had ever done for Bellamy? _Of course_ , she realized.

Monty and Jasper went first. Monty talked about Jasper getting him to leave the house and make friends, which Jasper matched (“got him out of his cave to socialize”), and Monty also guessed Jasper’s answer (“let me copy his math homework all though high school”), so they were two points up.

Harper turned to Bellamy.

“What’s the best thing Clarke ever did for you?”

“Took my sister in after our mother died,” Bellamy explained with a small lump in his throat. “It was the beginning of O and Clarke’s senior year of high school. I was at college and couldn’t afford to keep our family’s apartment. O lived with Clarke for the year, and that meant I didn’t have to worry about her, safety-wise anyway.”

Without thinking, Clarke reached over and rubbed his knee gently.

She turned over her napkin, and sure enough it said “let O live with me her senior year of high school.”

“That’s great that your families are so close,” Harper said softly. “I hope we all get to meet O at some point.”

Clarke’s hand on Bellamy’s knee gave a brief squeeze.

“Me too,” he said quietly.

“And what was the best thing Bellamy ever did for you, Clarke?” Monroe asked.

“Came to my college graduation,” Clarke answered, and Bellamy flipped his matching napkin onto the table.

The group looked puzzled at something so simple.

“I had no one else there,” Clarke explained. “My father had died the year before. My mom was out of the country for a big medical conference. Octavia had graduated a semester early and was already working at her first job out-of-state, so she couldn’t even travel back for the ceremony. I wasn’t even going to go, but my mentor was retiring and it was his last graduation ceremony and it meant a lot to him to hand me my diploma. So I went, and I collected my diploma, and as I walked across the stage, I spotted Bellamy in the crowd, there just to see me graduate.”

“Well of course he came, he’s your best friend!” Raven commented.

[What the group didn’t know is that Bellamy’s presence had stunned Clarke. She had always thought Bellamy hated her, just as she hated him, but as she locked eyes with him from the stage, she knew that neither of those things were true. That was the day she accepted that Bellamy was always going to be an enormous part of her life, regardless of whether either of them wanted that or not.]

“Last question,” Monroe announced. “What is your favorite thing about your best friend?”

Jasper answered that Monty’s “crazy sick brain skills” were his favorite, which everyone agreed matched Monty’s answer of “intelligence.” Monty’s favorite thing about Jasper was his spontaneity, but Jasper was sure Monty was going to say his ingenuity, so they only got one point for the round. Clarke and Bellamy couldn’t win, but they had a chance to tie it up if they both got this one right. 

“Clarke, what’s your favorite thing about Bellamy?”

Clarke had thought hard about her answer, trying to come up with something sincere. He drove her crazy 90% of the time, but of course he did have qualities that she liked.

“He’s reliable,” Clarke answered. “I can always count on him.”

It was no surprise that Bellamy got that one right – back in Arkadia everyone joked about how reliable he was all the time. The mother hen.

But when they asked Bellamy what his favorite thing about Clarke was, his answer surprised her.

“I trust her,” Bellamy said. “Completely.”

Clarke had written “my work ethic,” because she couldn’t actually think of a single thing that Bellamy really liked about her, and that seemed fairly neutral.

They lost the game, but Clarke couldn’t bring herself to care that much. While Monty and Jasper gorged on their celebratory cheese fries, Clarke’s mind raced.

Bellamy trusted her? Was that just something he said for the game, to continue the act that they were best friends? Clarke thought back on the previous month and the last few years. No, she thought, he did trust her. He might not like her, but he trusted her. And he demonstrated that trust all of the time.

Before she had a chance to think more about it, Murphy made his way back to the mic and everything else was set aside.

“Alright idiots,” he began, “the scores from the first half are in. You always disappoint me, but I guess you haven’t been as pathetic tonight as you usually are, so you can pat your egos on the back for a hot sec.”

(The weekly berating from Murphy was a major part of trivia night’s charm)

Murphy went through the standings, starting from the bottom and working his way up. There were 26 teams competing, which was high for their pub. In the back of her mind, Clarke was pretty sure they were violating fire code.

A few of the lowest-ranked teams had only stayed for a round or two and left. There were a number of ties, as per usual, and the longer Murphy went without calling out their team name, the more hopeful they got.

“In fifth place, we have the Flamekeepers,” Murphy declared, “trailing our fourth place team, the Nightbloods, by one point.”

It seemed the Flamekeepers were always chasing the Nightbloods.

“The Delinquents are currently tied for third place with the Dead Zone,” Murphy announced next.

“Fuck,” Jasper muttered.

“We’re still in this,” Harper encouraged.

Raven threw back a shot.

The Jobi Nuts were in second place, and a team called Eligius 3 was currently in first.

Murphy announced that theme of the fourth round was sports, and the team collectively groaned.

“Fucking Dax,” Clarke whispered.

“Yeah, you really don’t want to,” Monroe countered.

Clarke wrinkled her nose. “Noted.”

Fortunately, they hobbled through the sports round. Harper knew three of the eight questions. Clarke actually knew one because it was about an athlete her mother had operated on in Arkadia, not that she could tell the group that. Monty surprised everyone by knowing a question about a hockey player and Harper threw him a look that was equal parts suspicious and impressed. There were two questions they were sure they didn’t know, but Bellamy was confident with his answer for the last one.

“Do we really want to trust the history nerd with a sports question?” Jasper asked, adding a hasty “no offense” at the end.

Bellamy rolled his eyes.

“The question is whose funeral supposedly inspired the original Olympic games, so I would say this is more history than sports,” Bellamy countered, “and the answer is obviously Oenomaus. And it’s a stupid question, because that’s not even the mainstream opinion for how the Olympics got started, which according to Pausanius-”

“Shut up, shut up and just spell that O name,” Raven interrupted. “We need to hand in our answer sheets.”

Bellamy grabbed the answer book with a glare and wrote down the name.

Clarke volunteered to take their answer sheet up so that she wouldn’t have to listen to Bellamy explain the myth. After being best friends with Octavia Blake for eighteen years, she had heard more than her share of Greek mythology.

The fifth round was a series of brain teasers, so Raven was in her element. Looking around the room, Clarke thought this was sure to be a separator round – one where their team could take the lead. She tried to contribute to the brainstorming, but it became clear after the second question that this round was best left to Monty and Raven, so the rest of the team simply sipped their drinks and got out of their way.

The last round was always a general knowledge round, composed of truly random questions. Tonight, the team had to name the first four animated Disney movies, the three most popular condiments sold in the United States, and the 3 highest grossing Marvel movies, among other similarly random questions. They thought they did alright, though no one could decide on the condiments until Jasper just grabbed the pencil, wrote down his answers, and hissed at anyone who tried to argue with him.

The air was tense as Emori calculated the final scores. The Delinquents knew it would be close.

They closed their bar tabs and paid so that they could leave after the final results. Harper tried to make conversation, but everyone kept their eyes focused on the bar.

Finally, Murphy made his way to the microphone.

“Nice work, morons. I’m upgrading you all from disappointing to simply ‘unsatisfactory.’” Clarke warmed at the praise.

Murphy went through the final standings, and again the group just waited and hoped to _not_ hear their team called.

They got to third place, and they were still in it – Eligius 3 had dropped to third. When Murphy announced that second place went to the Nightbloods, the Delinquents let out a raucous cheer.

They had won, for the first time since Bellamy and Clarke had moved to Shallow Valley, and it felt _incredible_. They celebrated with hugs and high-fives and inappropriate face pats from Jasper. They collected their gift card for their bar tab and gave it to Raven to hold onto until next week.

Harper tried to snap a photo of everyone to put on Instagram, but Bellamy ducked down, pretending to tie his shoe, and Clarke hid her face behind Monroe. Staying off of social media was one of the hardest parts of their new life, but they had developed some good strategies.

Clarke rode the high the whole way home, recounting their most impressive moments and craziest questions. Normally she drove Bellamy crazy with all of this recap, but tonight she could tell he was just as into it as she was.

She poured them glasses of water when they got home and they sipped them in the kitchen, giggling giddily as their victory.

“I can’t believe I finally got a question about the Olympics,” Bellamy announced.

Clarke raised her glass to him.

“And how fake did it look when I said I knew that athlete because I had seen him at the airport once, rather than explaining that my mom performed 4 surgeries on him over the course of six months and he still sends her a Christmas card every year?”

Bellamy laughed.

They chatted more as they finished their water, but it was also clear that the energy of the evening was fading and exhaustion was setting in.

They headed to the stairs after checking to make sure the doors were locked and everything was turned off. It was all terribly domestic, Clarke thought to herself.

They brushed their teeth together, too happy after their victory to remember that they hated each other.

“Night, Princess,” Bellamy announced as he left the bathroom.

Something made Clarke grab his arm before he could leave, though.

She set her toothbrush back in the cup and turned to him.

“For the record, I trust you too,” she said softly.

Bellamy didn’t seem to know how to reply, but suddenly Clarke found herself pulled into a hug. It wasn’t desperate or passionate – it was just warm, solid, and comforting. It was a hug between two people who, in spite of their outward loathing for each other, knew that the person they were holding always, unquestionably, unconditionally had their back.

It was a good night.

* * *

The next day got even better, because a mail carrier who looked suspiciously like Roan dropped off a package for them at their front door. Clarke signed for it, raising an eyebrow at the familiar face.

“You know, Lincoln took Bellamy out to lunch last time,” Clarke griped.

“Yeah, yeah, some of us have places to be.”

Clarke slipped Roan the two burner phones they had used the month earlier and he tucked them into his pocket. They would be wiped and reset so they could be used again.

As Roan walked back to his vehicle, however, he slowed down considerably. Clarke peeked around the side of the house and noticed Raven out in the yard, fixing the latch on their side gate. A quick glance at Roan confirmed that that was what had slowed him down too.

He hesitated for a moment before shaking his head and resuming his pace to his car.

Clarke smirked.

When she got inside, she tore into the package. Bellamy set his book down and came to join her.

Sure enough, there were their temporary flip phones for the month. They each reached for one, checked the contacts, and then switched, as they had grabbed each other’s.

“I’ll let you call Octavia first,” Clarke told him. “I’ll start with my mom and Wells.”

“Good plan,” Bellamy agreed. “I’ll go up to my room – you can take the living room.”

They retreated to their separate corners for their respective chats.

Clarke was happy to hear her mother’s voice for the first time in a month and was pleased to note that her mother sounded far less panicked than she had in their first phone call. And this time, Clarke only had to spend 4 of her 20 minutes reassuring her mother that she was safe and happy, which was a considerable improvement over her first phone call, where she had spent over half of her time convincing her mother that she had a roof over her head and enough to eat.

Clarke told Abby about her work in the hospital, comparing the different types of cases she was seeing here to what they were used to in Arkadia. She also made sure to mention the athlete who had been the focus of a question at trivia the previous night.

With a few minutes left, Clarke noticed that Abby had gotten quiet.

“Mom, is something wrong?” Clarke asked.

“No, nothing’s wrong. I just… need to tell you something, and I’m having a hard time doing it,” Abby admitted.

Clarke looked at her watch.

“Well, we only have four minutes, so am I rude if I tell you to just get to it?”

There was another pause.

“I’ve started seeing Marcus Kane,” Abby blurted out.

Now it was Clarke’s turn to sit in silence for a moment. Clarke’s father had died eight years earlier. As far as Clarke knew, her mother had never dated anyone since then. Marcus was a close friend of hers – a family friend, really. He and Jake had regularly gone to baseball games together. Marcus had spoken at her father’s funeral.

Clarke felt like she had to say something, but couldn’t find words.

“Are you mad?” Abby asked quietly.

“No,” Clarke quickly reassured her. “Not mad. Definitely not mad. Just something I need to… adjust to,” she said slowly.

“I get it,” Abby told her.

Clarke took a deep breath, knowing she didn’t want to leave her mom in limbo for a month before they could talk again.

“I want you to be happy, Mom. Marcus is a great guy – he’s practically family already. If you two make each other happy, then that’s a good thing. And it does make me feel better to know that you have someone to be close to while I’m so far away,” she finished honestly.

She could hear Abby exhale a large breath.

“Oh thank God,” she said.

Clarke smiled now.

With their remaining minute, Abby told her a little bit about the dates she and Marcus had been on, and they quickly said their goodbyes. Clarke would have killed for five more minutes.

Clarke took a short break before calling Wells. She poured herself some iced tea and took a few minutes to breathe and digest what her mother had told her. She hadn’t lied to Abby – she was genuinely happy for her. It was still a lot to process, though.

She and Wells ended up talking about it for the first ten minutes of their conversation. It felt great to be able to talk to her best friend about this – she was glad she called Abby first. Wells agreed with her that Abby and Marcus were a good match, but he understood Clarke’s mixed feelings.

They also touched on his job and their friends at home.

“Is your jackass roommate behaving himself better this month?” Wells asked next. Clarke remembered that they spent most of their first phone call complaining about Bellamy. Of all of their friends, Wells was the only one who consistently joined Clarke in her spats against the elder Blake.

“Yes, sorry to disappoint,” she told him with a laugh. “We seem to have reached some sort of truce.”

“I guess some people would call that ‘maturity,’” Wells said with a groan.

“Some people, just not us,” Clarke agreed.

“Just promise me that even if you guys actually become friends after this, you’ll still always choose my side in prank wars.”

Clarke promised him, laughing as she remembered their last victory. Wells had convinced Bellamy to examine a supposed crack in the exterior wall of his townhouse and, when he was perfectly in position, Clarke had dumped a bucket of water on him from the upstairs bathroom window.

He had deserved it, though, after sneaking her car keys out of her purse the last time they were out with their friends and turning the music in her car to max volume. She had practically had a heart attack when she turned her car on several hours later.

When she hung up with Wells, she was in a decidedly better mood than after her first phone call.

Her last twenty-minute conversation was with Octavia. Before she called, she heard Bellamy coming downstairs, clearly done with his two conversations, so she knew Octavia was free. She took the opportunity to swap floors with him, going to her room to make her last call. She noticed that Bellamy looked a little sullen, but knew that it was hard on him to only have 20 minutes with O.

Clarke didn’t have to tell Octavia about the trivia match because Bellamy had already filled her in. She told her about Abby and Marcus, but was sort of tired of talking about it after the previous two conversations. She and Octavia caught up about other things – Octavia’s latest cooking project, Clarke’s unsuccessful quest to find a local place that made coffee as good as their favorite shop in Arkadia. Clarke felt a little off about the conversation, though, and remembered how she felt when her phone call with Abby ended long before she wished it had. When there were eight minutes left on her call with Octavia, she made a decision.

When she told Octavia about it, her friend’s reaction told her it was the right move.

She raced downstairs before shoving her phone at a confused Bellamy.

“You have,” she looked at her watch, “six and a half more minutes.”

When Bellamy heard Octavia’s voice, his eyes met Clarke’s and she wasn’t sure she had ever seen more gratitude in them. She gave him a small smile and retreated back to her room to give them some privacy.

When Clarke came back downstairs a while later, Bellamy topped off her iced tea and she noticed that he wore a much brighter smile than earlier.

“Thanks for that,” he told her.

“No problem. I was sort of talked out after catching up with my mom and Wells.” She told him about Marcus and her mother dating. Bellamy didn’t know Kane well, but had met him a few times.

“How are you feeling about her dating?” he asked.

“It’s… weird,” Clarke admitted. “But it feels like the kind of thing I need to get used to. Her happiness is more important to me than my comfort, especially when I know that he’s such a good person.”

Bellamy nodded, agreeing with her assessment.

“Can I ask you something?” Bellamy asked after a few quiet moments.

“Shoot.”

“Did you only list Octavia on your contact list so that you could give me more time to talk with her? I know you two are close, but I didn’t think you were “top three contacts” close.”

“I mean, I probably would have listed her regardless, because she is one of my best friends, but yeah, I sort of thought I could play the system a bit,” Clarke admitted. “I thought if I could give you a few more minutes with her from time to time, it could help to keep you sane.”

Bellamy rubbed the back of his neck, not really sure how to respond.

“I mean, I couldn’t just have _two_ contacts. That would look pathetic,” she fired at him, smirking.

“Well my third wasn’t an option,” Bellamy blurted. Clarke could tell he immediately regretted saying it, and he quickly tried to change the subject, asking what she wanted to do for dinner. Clarke wasn’t having it, though.

“What do you mean, your third wasn’t an option?” she hounded. Bellamy left the kitchen for the living room, but she followed him.

“I don’t have Diane Kruger’s number,” he told her, referencing the crush everyone had teased him about for years since the actress had played Helen in _Troy_.

Clarke rolled her eyes, not taking the bait.

“If I wasn’t here with you, would you have listed me as your third contact?” she demanded.

“I don’t know? Probably!” he shouted, throwing his arms up in defeat.

Clarke was stunned, but thought about it – if he hadn’t been with her, she would have also tried to somehow get him onto her contact list. Or she would have listed Octavia, but tried to find a way to talk to Bellamy too. The idea of _not_ being in contact with him for an indefinite period of time somehow made her nauseous.

“What do I have to do to make you not mock me for this for the rest of the night?” Bellamy asked.

Clarke made a show of carefully thinking about it, rubbing her chin, looking at the ceiling, and humming.

Bellamy issued an exasperated sigh.

Clarke’s eyes finally lit up with an idea, and Bellamy knew he wasn’t going to like it.

“Breakfast for dinner!” she announced.

Bellamy immediately began protesting.

“Breakfast foods for dinner are entirely inappropriate,” he began.

“Do you want to talk more about how I’m at least your second best friend in the world?” Clarke countered.

Bellamy looked truly torn, but finally asked, in defeat, “pancakes or French toast?”

“Both,” Clarke answered with a smirk.

Bellamy ran his hand down his face before heading into the kitchen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be fair, I also hate breakfast for dinner, but I acknowledge that I am a grump.
> 
> I had too much fun with this trivia scene. Was it boring? Did I get too into it? Did you catch my joke about Flamekeepers chasing Nightbloods? I originally had a joke in there about one team being just one guy named Jason who sat by himself and always got all of the answers wrong, but I thought that was a little too on-the-nose. This chapter honestly started with a plan to introduce Murphy and Emori as bartenders, and then suddenly I was like “what if Murphy was a trivia master” and then it took over my life.
> 
> ANYWAY, next chapter should be up in 2 weeks. They all just keep turning out longer than I plan because I keep getting lost in banter. The plot will start to pick up in the next two chapters, though, and we'll have more happy times but also some not-so-happy ones.


	6. Truths, Tricks, and Secrets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all for the comments and kudos! It definitely motivates me to keep writing. I think this is a fun chapter and I hope you enjoy it.

August bled into September and, while the Delinquents didn’t repeat their victory at trivia the following week (Clarke blamed Dax), at least the cooler weather made the bonfires more fun. Bellamy still missed the city, but he had to admit that he appreciated the mountain weather much more than the oppressive heat of Arkadia.

He was especially thankful for the change in weather when he was at work, because the “air conditioning” at the Shallow Valley Historical Center never really seemed to be fully operational. Luckily, the system worked well in the storage and preservation rooms, where the material really required the colder temperatures. He spent a good amount of time in the preservation rooms, but with such a small staff he also had to take shifts in the main museum, where the temperature was often stifling.

Today he was working with his colleague, Luna, on ideas for the new displays they would put out for the Fall. The focus over the summer was on tourists (the few that made their way to Shallow Valley), but for the Fall they would shift their focus to education to prepare for the various school groups that would visit their facility.

Bellamy had specialized in transnational, pre-Columbian history in graduate school and, in his previous job in Arkadia, he had been the Assistant Curator for a section of Arkadia’s museum system specializing in Ancient and Post-classical history. It really was his dream job, and he hoped it would be there waiting for him when all of this was over.

Shallow Valley didn’t have much in the way of antiquities. In some ways, Bellamy appreciated this, since he always felt a little nauseous of the ethics of American museums keeping and displaying antiquities from other cultures. He had recently worked to return some items to native collections and his last completed project had included adding descriptions to each item on display to explain where they had come from, not just in terms of geographical area or time, but in terms of the people who had made and possessed the item. He had also added descriptions of how each item came to be _dispossessed_ by those people (found in digs or stolen outright, usually), an effort that had earned him commendations from his supervisor.

But, of course, this was the United States, and Bellamy couldn’t avoid colonialism altogether. He and Luna now sat at the table, poring over spreadsheets and photographs of their various collections, trying to come up with ideas for new ways to tell the region’s history. The history of Shallow Valley was a predictable one for anyone versed in American history. The town’s land had been part of Crow territory. The indigenous people who had lived here were primarily nomadic, following bison herds across the region. European and American settlers pushed the native peoples out after discovering gold, and the indigenous people who survived found themselves penned in on reservations.

The challenge for the Historical Center was how to tell the history of the town accurately while also not painting the town’s current residents purely as the descendants of villains (for the annoyingly practical reason that those citizens funded said Historical Center). It was a dilemma museum curators were well used to, though Bellamy had never had to navigate it with such a small collection.

“Last year we focused primarily on the gold mining,” Luna explained. “The townspeople loved it and the kids really got a kick out of panning for pretend gold.”

“I could see that being a hit,” Bellamy replied.

“We could focus in on the actual conflict between the native peoples and settlers,” Luna brainstormed, “just take it head-on and make it the center of the exhibit.”

“Would the director go for that?”

“Probably not,” Luna sighed, rubbing her temples. They had been at this for over an hour now. Each time they got a good idea, they realized they didn’t have enough artifacts to create full displays for it. What they did have was leading them down the predictable, celebrate-white-people-and-pretend-native-peoples-voluntarily-left pathway.

Bellamy thought for a moment.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” he began, “but what if we didn’t make it about history at all.”

Luna looked up, confused.

“What if we made it about Shallow Valley today – about how our current citizens live their lives. And we could also use it as an opportunity to highlight to students that native peoples are still here today and don’t live caricatured, oversimplistic lives.”

His colleague started to smile. “I like it,” she said, flipping through her documents for their most recent acquisitions.

Bellamy stood and started pacing, his ideas coming to him quickly.

“And we could use the exhibit to teach students about what history really is – about what we leave behind and how future scholars find and interpret it.”

“And we could add an activity where they have to write a history of their world today,” Luna added.

“Exactly,” Bellamy agreed. “And we could even add in an oral history component and interview some locals.”

Luna opened up a new doc on her computer and the two started writing down all of their ideas.

* * *

Bellamy thought about his plans for the new exhibit as he cooked dinner that night. Clarke was supposed to get off work at 6, so he thought he would throw together a quick stir-fry. They often shared meals these days, simply because it was easier and cheaper than both of them cooking for one. Bellamy liked being at the stove. He liked chopping ingredients, adding spices, hearing the sizzle of things cooking. Clarke preferred “set it and forget it” meals, so on days she cooked she often took advantage of the crock pot. He still couldn’t figure out how she got her roast chicken so perfect, too.

He was excited to tell Clarke about the exhibit because he knew she shared his views on the ethics of museum displays and especially on the underrepresentation of indigenous people. Just as he turned off the burner, he heard the front door of their house open and his lips turned up in a small smile.

_Perfect timing_ , he thought.

“Dinner’s ready!” he called out before reaching into the cupboard for two bowls. He started to fix his own meal, serving himself rice and then adding the chicken and veggies on top when he realized that he hadn’t heard from Clarke yet. Their house was small – she would usually be in the kitchen by now.

He stood for a moment, listening. He could hear small movements by the entryway. He frowned and set down his bowl.

“Clarke?” he called as he rounded the corner to see what was delaying her in the foyer.

He found her there and immediately knew something was wrong. She had set down her bag and was slowly peeling off the light jacket she wore to work. She looked exhausted and her eyes were vacant.

Bellamy sped up his steps and gently took her elbows in his hands. It took her a moment to meet his eyes.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asked gently.

He could tell she was having trouble getting words out, so he guided her to the couch and helped her sit down, perching on the table in front of her and holding onto her hands with his.

Clarke took a deep breath with her eyes closed.

“I lost a patient today,” she said quietly.

Bellamy rubbed Clarke’s hands with her thumbs. He knew she wasn’t done talking yet. She had lost patients before and, while it was never easy, he had never seen one break her like this. He waited for her to tell the rest of the story.

“I lost a child today,” she continued after a few silent moments, “a child that shouldn’t have died.”

Bellamy’s heart sank to his feet. He knew children were the toughest for Clarke to lose.

“She had battled leukemia for six years and beat it. She had been in remission for eighteen months. And today she chased a bird into the road and was hit by a car and I tried to save her but too much was broken and I did the best I could with setting the bones but she had lost so much blood and I did the transfusions but it just wasn’t enough so I-”

She continued to pour out words that Bellamy had no hope of understanding, but he could tell that she was reliving the entire day over and over, trying her best to think of what she could have done differently.

He cut her off mid-sentence, pulling her into a tight hug. He felt her chest release a sob as she buried her head into his shoulder.

“You did everything you could, Clarke,” he told her.

“I should have done more,” came her muffled reply.

He continued to hold her, rubbing her back and providing a steady presence.

“You did everything you could,” he repeated to her over and over again.

“I should have saved her.”

“You couldn’t.”

“I wish I could have.”

“I wish you could have too.”

Bellamy continued to hold her for the next ten minutes or so until she had calmed down.

“I’m sorry about all of this,” Clarke told him, rubbing at her eyes and starting to look embarrassed.

“Hey, what are fake best friends for?” Bellamy replied, trying to lighten the mood.

Clarke’s lips turned up slightly.

“Can I say something and have you promise never to gloat about it or bring it up again?” she asked.

“I feel like I can grant you that this one time.”

“You’re a pretty great fake best friend.”

“You’re not too bad yourself, Princess,” Bellamy replied.

He helped her up to bed, promising to put the leftover food in the fridge for when she felt up to eating it. He knew that sleep was more important to her at this point.

She told him that she hadn’t felt up to driving home and a coworker had dropped her off, so they made plans to pick up her car the next day.

Bellamy wanted to tell her to give her brain a break, but he knew how she processed things – she needed to hold onto small practical pieces to avoid collapsing under the weight of what she had witnessed and experienced. Doing things like planning the car pick-up gave her a lifeline, something to hold onto and focus her attention on.

Bellamy’s stirfry was cold by the time he got downstairs to eat it, but he didn’t notice.

* * *

It took a few days for Clarke to get back into her groove. Bellamy could tell that she was still feeling guilty for the lost patient, but her shifts at work seemed to build her confidence. She also assured him that her colleagues were supporting her and that they understood how painful the loss had been.

As Bellamy had predicted, she did like hearing about the new displays at the Historical Center and, in some ways, it provided a reasonable distraction. She even stopped by on one of her days off to see what he was putting together. She and Luna immediately hit it off and Clarke even invited her to join them for trivia the next week. It turned out Luna used to play on the Nightbloods team, but that she had left the team after everything had gotten so cutthroat.

Towards the end of September, Raven invited them both on a weekend trip with the rest of their friend group. One of her colleagues had a cabin in the mountains and had offered it to her for the weekend as a thank you to Raven for defeating what she even admitted was “the largest virus she had ever seen.” Clarke and Bellamy were even able to get Friday off and the whole gang decided to drive to the cabin Friday morning so that they could have as much time there as possible.

Clarke drove Bellamy, Monroe, and Dax in their car. Raven and Harper had Monty and Jasper with them. Fox drove her truck that they filled with food and gear.

The cabin was a few hours away and the scenery grew prettier and prettier the closer they got to it. Soon they weren’t just seeing mountains in the distance; they were surrounded by them and Bellamy couldn’t believe just how high they were up-close. He found himself holding his breath as they drove through one spectacular pass.

“Guess they don’t have these in the city,” Dax said with a smirk.

“They have skyscrapers, though,” Monroe pointed out.

“Trust me, they’re nothing like this,” Bellamy replied softly as he stared out his window.

The cabin was like something off of a postcard. All wood and stone, with a huge wrap-around porch nestled among pine trees and mountains. Inside, there was a cozy living room with the furniture all centered around an enormous fireplace and a kitchen that, while a little rundown, looked like it would easily fit all of them. There were three small bedrooms upstairs: one with a full-sized bed and two with three single beds squashed into each one with barely enough room to walk around them. It was dated and musty and perfect.

The group had decided Monty and Harper should share the room with the full-sized bed, seeing as they were the only couple in attendance. Bellamy, Dax, and Jasper would take one of the other bedrooms. Clarke, Monroe, and Fox were sharing the third. Raven preferred to sleep on the couch downstairs because the stairs were steep and tough on her injured leg.

They unloaded their gear and food quickly and raced outside to walk the property. The air felt crisp with a bit of a bite to it and Bellamy wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to make himself leave after this weekend. He and Clarke had to duck a few more cameras as their friends took shots for Instagram, but he was pretty sure they were safe.

Monroe cracked open a beer and everyone took that as a signal that the weekend had officially begun. Within an hour of arriving, they were sprawled out on the front porch of the cabin, drinking, snacking, and catching up.

“Is this your first time camping?” Raven asked Bellamy and Clarke.

“It’s my first time _really_ camping,” Bellamy replied. “Octavia and I used to build tents out of sheets in our apartment, but that was as close as I got.”

The group snickered and turned to Clarke.

“I used to camp in Girl Scouts,” Clarke replied.

“More like glamping,” Bellamy retorted.

“That’s fair,” Clarke surprised him by agreeing with a laugh. “When my mom was our leader, she didn’t have the patience for all of the outdoorsy stuff, so we would usually stay at some sort of resort. But that year before I got kicked out of my first troop we went camping!”

“Wait, you got kicked out of a Girl Scout troop?” Fox asked.

Clarke flashed a toothy smile and Bellamy grinned too, recalling the story he had told Roan a couple of months earlier.

“Proudly. And that’s how Octavia and I first became friends. We were in the same troop together when we were ten. We were getting ready for one of those camping trips, but Octavia couldn’t afford the gear required, which was admittedly stupid expensive, and this other girl was making fun of her for it, so I decked her. My mom had to start her own troop for us after that – no one else would take me. And Abby Gr-Smith wasn’t about to let her daughter go troop-less,” Clarke finished, narrowly catching herself before giving out her real last name.

The group chuckled at the story and even Bellamy found himself enjoying it. Clarke drove him insane, but he knew his sister was lucky to have her – she was a staunchly loyal friend.

“So just the glamping?” Harper asked.

“I used to go camping with my dad too, before he passed,” Clarke told the group. Bellamy had forgotten about this. He didn’t spend a lot of time around Abby, but he had liked Jake a lot. Jake knew he and Octavia didn’t have a steady father figure in their lives, so he tried to offer up whatever he could provide in the way of that after Clarke and Octavia became friends. He had helped Bellamy apply to colleges, too. He had never tried to insert himself too far into their lives, had never tried to be a full surrogate dad, but he had been a supportive, reliable presence in their lives.

Bellamy came out of his thoughts as Clarke was wrapping up her short explanation of how she and Jake used to drive out of the city on long weekends to fish and sleep in a tent – something Abby would never have done, she added with a chuckle. The group continued to chat, with their other friends sharing their own camping stories and memories of their parents. Bellamy absentmindedly reached out and gave Clarke’s knee a squeeze. She turned to him and gave him a tight smile that softened after a moment.

He tuned out their friends and briefly remembered the day he got the call from Octavia eight years earlier. She and Clarke were just finishing up their junior year of college. Bellamy was working towards his Master’s Degree at the time at a different school in the same city. When he saw the incoming call midway through the afternoon – at a time when O should have been in class – he knew instinctively that something was wrong.

Jake was an engineer and had been on-site that day at a building that was going up near the heart of downtown. He had been talking to the foreman, joking around about adding extra elevators just to give him a headache, when a cable snapped on a piece of machinery. Jake pushed the foreman out of the way, using his last breath to save someone else. Bellamy wouldn’t have expected anything less of him.

It was a freak accident, which messed both Abby and Clarke up in different ways. Abby couldn’t come to terms with the fact that he died instantly – that she hadn’t even had a _chance_ to save his life. Clarke became obsessed with understanding the mechanics of what happened. For years afterward, Bellamy noticed how her eyes lingered when they passed any construction site, trying to piece together the steps that had taken her father from laughing to dead within seconds.

He remembered taking the subway to O and Clarke’s apartment and letting himself in with the spare key Octavia had made for him. Octavia met him in the kitchen, wringing her hands. The siblings shared a crushing hug.

“You ok?” Bellamy asked.

Octavia nodded, brushing away tears and taking a deep breath.

“It’s not me we have to worry about,” she told him, but Bellamy already knew that.

“Where’s Abby?” Bellamy asked.

“At the morgue, identifying the body and asking eight million questions.”

Bellamy started to head towards Clarke’s closed door, but Octavia grasped his arm.

“She doesn’t want to see anyone,” Octavia told him.

But Bellamy knew he wasn’t anyone. He wasn’t her family, he wasn’t her friend, but he was the person she needed right now. He was someone she could be honest around without worrying about his feelings – someone she could break down in front of. And his suspicions were confirmed when he slipped into her room.

She was sitting on her bed, picking at a thread at the edge of her pillowcase. She looked up in panic when the door opened, but her shoulders sunk in relief when she saw it was him.

Neither said anything. There really wasn’t much to say. He held her as she sobbed, as she allowed herself to fall apart for the first and last time after Jake’s death. He stayed for hours.

And they never talked about it again after that day.

* * *

That evening, after filling themselves with hog dogs and smores, the group sat outside around a raging campfire. Jasper was attempting to tell a scary story, but he kept getting mixed up and backtracking, trying to remember the next part. It was possible he was a little high.

After the fourth variation of “wait, no, the guy was in an asylum… or was it a cemetery?” Harper intervened and steered the evening conversation in a different direction.

“Oooookay, Jasper, let’s circle back to that story some other time. I have a better idea,” she announced with a glint in her eye.

“Not again,” groaned Monty, Raven, Monroe, Fox, and Dax all at once. Bellamy and Clarke looked around, confused.

“It’s her favorite,” Monty explained.

“It’s time for Truth or Dare, bitches!” Harper announced.

Now Bellamy and Clarke joined the groaning.

“Do we have to? You do remember how this ended last time,” Monroe told her. She turned to Clarke. “Clarke, have you heard anything in the hospital about a guy coming in naked with near hypothermia after jumping into a lake in the middle of January?”

Clarke appeared to think for a minute. “Maybe?”

“But instead of blue he was green?”

“Oh yeah, because of some sort of radioactive body paint? Dr. Nyko was just telling me about that,” Clarke answered.

Jasper stood and bowed.

“Oh no,” Clarke groaned.

“Yup,” Raven confirmed. “It’s always a disaster. It’s kind of great that you’re here, though, because now if someone gets hurt we won’t have to go the whole way to the hospital!”

“But without my supplies and equipment I can’t-” Clarke began, but Harper cut her off.

“Ok, let’s get started. Dax, truth or dare?”

“Dare,” Dax said, predictably. Harper dared him to chop more firewood in the dark without a flashlight.

“No way,” Clarke started. “We’re not letting him swing an axe in the dark!” Bellamy, Monty, and Raven also looked concerned, but Harper shushed them and laughed when Dax ran to the woodpile.

With every sling of the axe, Bellamy expected to hear a bloodcurdling scream, but luckily none came. After three agonizing minutes, Dax returned with an armload of wood and a smug grin.

“Just think,” he said to Clarke, “of all of the dares we’ve completed that _didn’t_ send us to the hospital.”

Bellamy took a swig of his drink. This was going to be a long night.

Dax was up next. “Clarke, truth or dare.”

“Definitely truth, after seeing that.”

“If you had to make out with one person here, who would it be?” Dax asked. Everyone in the circle groaned at the question. Monty threw a marshmallow at his head.

Clarke pretended to think for a moment before turning back to him.

“Definitely you, Dax,” she told him with mock sincerity. The group laughed and Monroe asked if lying was allowed in _truth_ or dare.

“Lying is forbidden, which means it’s the truth,” Dax replied smugly. At least he was a good sport.

The game proceeded for a while with, fortunately, no lost limbs. Clarke dared Monroe to put a whole smore into her mouth all at once, which she was just barely able to do. Monroe asked Monty what was the most afraid he had ever been, which Monty answered with a story about being left by his parents at a gas station in the middle of nowhere for six hours when he was eight years old.

When it was Monty’s turn, Jasper stood up and shouted “Monty dares Jasper to go onto the roof” and took off running towards the cabin. Fortunately, Bellamy and Harper reached him in time to snag him under the arms and carry him back to the fire.

More dares were completed and questions answered. On Harper’s turn, she asked Bellamy why he stayed away from all social media. That was a question he hadn’t been expecting and he could sense Clarke stiffening next to him.

“My sister had her identity stolen that way,” he blurted out. It was a bold lie, but he couldn’t come up with anything better.

“From facebook?” Fox asked, suddenly looking nervous.

Bellamy quickly put some pieces together in his head. “Yeah, some guy was able to figure out her address based on pictures she posted, and she had her birthday up there and everything, and then he managed to hack into her page and send messages to relatives to find out the other stuff. It was a whole mess. So now I just stay away from it completely.”

He snuck a look at Clarke and found her eyebrows raised in a way that told him she was impressed by his quick thinking.

“What about you, Clarke, you don’t use anything either,” Fox pushed.

“Yeah, once the third creepy stalker guy showed up at work, I decided to just drop all of that,” Clarke answered easily. Bellamy thought that story wasn’t too believable with so few details, but literally every girl around the circle issued a sigh of familiarity and resignation.

Stupid fucking toxic masculinity.

By midnight, everyone was exhausted from the day’s events, and they called the game for the night.

“But nobody even got injured,” Jasper lamented.

“There’s always tomorrow night,” Raven comforted him, patting him on the shoulder.

They cleaned up around the fire and headed inside to get ready for bed. Bellamy helped put the fire out and carry in the extra food, taking the time to put it away correctly so that they would be able to eat more tomorrow without the risk of food poisoning. No matter where he was or who he was with, Bellamy was always going to be the mom.

By the time he said goodnight to Raven and headed upstairs, everyone else had changed into their pajamas and was getting ready for bed. He dug through his bag and found his toothbrush, but quickly discovered that he had forgotten his toothpaste. No matter, he thought, Clarke used the same kind so he would borrow some of hers.

He headed across the hall and poked his head into the bathroom that was crowded with his friends washing their faces and brushing their teeth, but Clarke wasn’t there, so he went to the girls’ room next. The door was open and Clarke was standing at a bed, digging through her bag for something.

“Hey Clarke, can I bum some toothpaste off of… wait, not again!” Bellamy finished with a small shout, as Clarke turned around, confused.

“What, you need toothpaste?” she asked.

“Why are you wearing my shirt?” Bellamy demanded.

Clarke looked down. She was wearing a baggy navy tshirt and sleep shorts. The shirt was perfectly worn in, soft, and _his_.

“Oh relax, it’s just a shirt,” she said dismissively.

“I forgot you were a clothing klepto.”

By this point, their other friends had come up behind them to see what was happening.

“What’s going on?” Monroe asked.

“This one is constantly stealing my clothes,” Bellamy announced, gesturing to Clarke.

“It’s just a tshirt, Bellamy, calm down.”

“It’s not just a tshirt! It’s the maroon hoodie all over again!”

“For the last time, I never had your maroon hoodie!”

[She did, though. She had stolen it in college. It was in her closet in their house in Shallow Valley right now. It was her favorite, so he could just deal with it.]

Monroe was snickering. “Is this like a thing you guys do?”

“Not me!” Bellamy defended. “Her! She has been stealing my clothes for years!”

Clarke rolled her eyes again and everyone started laughing.

“When we get home, I will wash and return your tshirt to you,” she promised him. She raised her right hand, looked him in the eye, and added with mock sincerity “scout’s honor.”

“Oh, like that means anything coming from someone who was _kicked out_ of scouts!”

“I was kicked out of one _troop_ , Bellamy, not all of scouts!”

“There’s an obvious solution here,” Fox interrupted with a glint in her eye. “If Clarke keeps stealing Bellamy’s clothing, Bellamy gets to steal some of hers.”

Clarke rolled her eyes at the absurd idea of Bellamy squeezing into her clothes, but Bellamy’s eyes lit up.

“That’s a great idea, Fox.” He reached into Clarke’s bag and pulled out a green ribbed tank top. “I think I’ll start with this.” He pulled his own shirt off and tried to fit the tank top over his head.

Everyone was howling with laughter at this point. Bellamy managed to pull the tank top onto his body, but it looked like it was cutting off his circulation and it ended above his belly button.

“Stop it, Bell, you’re stretching it out!” Clarke protested, trying to get the shirt back, but Bellamy danced away.

“These are the consequences, Princess! You steal my clothes and I steal yours!”

“Fine! I surrender! Just give me my tank top back!” She grabbed at the hem and tugged, which only resulted it in getting tangled in Bellamy’s hair and shoulders. When they finally worked it off of him, Clarke held it out at a distance, frowning at how rumpled and stretched out it was. She glared at Bellamy. He plucked her toothpaste from her bag and sauntered to the bathroom, leaving everyone doubled over in laughter from the whole scene (and possibly from the alcohol and… other things… they had consumed).

When he returned to his room after brushing his teeth, Jasper and Dax were already in their beds and the lights were off. Bellamy quickly changed into the loose pants he typically slept in and a grey t-shirt (luckily no one had _stolen_ this one yet) and slipped into bed.

* * *

The next day, after an enormous breakfast (and then an hour spent digesting said breakfast), everyone suited up to go on a big hike. Bellamy was excited about this – he had always dreamed of hiking in the mountains when he lived in the city. He had gone for small walks in Shallow Valley, but this would be his first real _hike_.

Some people were less enthusiastic.

“I just don’t understand the point of walking around all day to look at the mountains when I can just look at them from here,” Clarke grumbled for the fifth time.

“Nothing beats that mountain air, though,” Harper countered.

Clarke took a deep, almost comical breath.

“Well look at that, I just got a good mouthful of it. Does that mean I can stay here?”

Harper only laughed and dragged her to the cars so they could drive to the trailhead.

When they started their hike, everyone (except for grumbly Clarke) was in good spirits. Bellamy giddily led the group with Harper, pretending like he understood the map and trail signs far better than he actually did. Harper allowed it.

The view was spectacular and the air felt bracing. Bellamy felt connected to the earth with each step and couldn’t believe he had lived over thirty years without doing this, without being here.

After a few miles, however, the allure started to fade. His feet were hurting in his shoes. He couldn’t understand why he had packed such a heavy backpack. He looked up the trail and wondered how much more fun this journey would be from the side of a car.

The group stopped at a beautiful overlook two hours into the hike to eat the lunch they had packed. The break was exactly what Bellamy needed to get his energy back. He stretched, adjusted his shoes, and soon felt ready to get moving again.

As the group started to reassemble, though, it was clear that he wasn’t the only fun feeling the pain of the first part of the hike. Raven’s leg was bothering her, though she had done a good job of keeping her balance, even over the areas of rocky terrain.

“I think I’m done for the day, kids,” she announced, pulling out a book.

“She really needs someone one to stay and keep an eye on her leg,” Clarke announced. “Ideally someone with medical training, in case something is really wrong.” She made a show of pretending to look around the group. “I guess that means I’m staying behind.”

“Are you using my leg to get out of hiking more?”

“Absolutely,” Clarke admitted without shame. She earned a grin from Raven.

Monroe decided to stay behind too, opting for a nap in the sun. Clarke pulled out her sketchbook, thankful she had brought it with her, even if it did add extra weight to her pack.

“How much longer were we planning to hike?” Jasper asked, wavering.

Harper considered the map. Bellamy peered at it too with his hands on his hips, pretending he knew how to interpret it.

“It’s about two more miles to the spot we were aiming for,”

“Two miles,” echoed Bellamy.

“But at least half of that is going to be pretty steep and slow-going.”

“Yup, I’d say about half,” Bellamy added. Harper turned to him and glared before continuing.

“I’d say we have about three more hours total to get there and back, maybe four depending on how long we spend up there,” Harper finished.

Jasper decided to try out the rest of the hike. He joined Harper, Bellamy, Fox, Dax, and Monty, leaving the other three at the overlook. Luckily, they were also able to leave a few of their packs behind, only keeping water, first aid supplies, and a few snacks between them.

Bellamy looked over his shoulder before they set off. Raven was happily settled under a tree, reading her book. Monroe was already falling asleep a few feet away from her. Clarke was perched near the edge of the overlook, sketching. The sight of it made him smile, especially when he remembered how busy her last few weeks of work had been. She deserved this, and he resolved to not even make fun of her for not completing the hike. He was such a good person.

The next leg of the hike was pretty easygoing, with a path wide enough for them to walk in pairs and ground level enough for them to make light conversation without losing their breath. Harper warned them this would only last for a mile or so, though. (Bellamy nodded confidently in agreement.)

Dax fell into step beside him and Bellamy tried not to be annoyed. He didn’t mind Dax, not really, but he wasn’t Bellamy’s first choice of traveling companions.

“So what do you think?” Dax asked, as if Bellamy should know what he was thinking. He did this all the time, and it drove Bellamy insane.

“About what,” he asked through gritted teeth.

“Do you think I have a chance with her?”

“With _whom_?” Bellamy asked, getting even more annoyed.

“With Clarke, obviously.”

Bellamy stopped short and Fox almost ran into him.

“You were serious about that?” he asked, resuming his pace.

“Of course,” Dax told him. “She’s a doctor and she’s hot – of course I’m serious about it.”

Bellamy scrambled to think. He knew immediately that there was no chance in hell Clarke would ever go for Dax. He was a meathead with little ambition and questionable politics. When Clarke had told everyone she was bisexual during one of their bonfires, Dax had responded with “hot.” Yeah, he had zero chance with Clarke.

Bellamy opened his mouth and started to let Dax down gently, but suddenly his jaw snapped shut.

He had just had an idea. An awesome, terrible idea. An idea that would get Clarke back for constantly stealing his clothes.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Bellamy began. “But I can tell that she’s really into you.”

“Yeah?”

“Oh definitely. But if you really want to pursue things, I could give you a few tips. I do know her pretty well, after all.”

Dax was all ears.

“Clarke likes mindgames. She likes when a guy plays her hot and cold – like when you show a ton of interest one day, but then forget her name the next.” He was thinking of Lexa and how she would bounce from betraying Clarke when she most needed her to swearing her undying loyalty the next day. He had hated Lexa when she and Clarke dated, and she was now referred to as She Who Must Not Be Named within their friend group.

“She also loves sports statistics and really long, detailed stories of sporting events, particularly championships.” This time he was thinking of that guy Clarke had dated sophomore year of college, who was so boring that Bellamy couldn’t even remember his name.

Dax nodded, smiling. “I’ve got plenty of those!”

“Shoulder rubs are her favorite, too.” Clarke HATED when anyone touched her shoulders. Bellamy had been kicked in the shins too many times in response to not know that.

“But what she likes more than _anything_ , and the one thing guaranteed to make her heart _melt_ , is poetry,” Bellamy finished.

“Poetry?” Dax asked, wary now.

“Yup. Poetry you write yourself. But nothing with rhymes – like the real deep, heartfelt shit.”

Dax didn’t look as excited about this information, but he filed it away.

The truth was that Clarke was the most impatient person Bellamy had ever known, and that included his extremely impulsive sister. Clarke wouldn’t watch a movie or tv show without looking up spoilers first. She never cooked pasta long enough, claiming it was “al dente” when it was still crunchy in the middle. She could barely finish a book and had used sparknotes for everything she had been assigned to read in high school and college. And she hated, hated, HATED poetry.

Bellamy felt bad for a minute, both for Dax and for Clarke, but then he remembered that Dax never had a chance to begin with, and that Clarke had stolen his favorite navy shirt (and he was POSITIVE she had his maroon hoodie), and he didn’t feel so bad.

They had to stop talking as the terrain got steeper and rockier. The rest of the hike was a challenge, but the view from the peak was worth it. Bellamy stared out at the mountains and valleys, in awe of everything in front of him. And he took some pictures for Clarke, knowing he would need something in the way of apology after setting Dax loose on her.

* * *

They managed to talk Harper out of another round of Truth or Dare that night, opting instead for a board game night using the games Jasper had brought with him. Bellamy noticed that Dax was definitely taking his advice.

Dax spent half of the night glued to Clarke’s side, telling her mindless details about the March Madness games he had watched earlier that Spring over a round of Connect Four. Bellamy could tell Clarke was trying to be polite, but was practically falling asleep as he was talking. She tried to change the subject a couple of times, but Dax just launched into a lengthy description of his favorite coach’s defensive strategies or the impact of a certain kind of injury on team morale.

Then when Clarke started to reply, Dax abruptly shut her down and walked away to join Jasper and Monty in a game of Scrabble, winking at Bellamy as he did so. His take on “hot and cold” made Bellamy laugh so hard he had to hide it in a cough.

Bellamy was now playing Jenga with Clarke, Raven, and Dax. Raven pulled a precarious looking block and set it on top, releasing a carefully held breath.

Clarke peered around the tower, looking for just the right piece to snag. Dax came up behind her, whispered “you got this” into her hear, and gripped her shoulders in his hands.

Instantly, Clarke froze and her eyes shot up. Dax, oblivious to her discomfort, massaged her shoulders with his thumbs. Clarke caught Bellamy’s eye across the table and Bellamy tried to keep a straight face, but somehow she must have immediately seen through it. She glared at him before carefully extricating herself from Dax’s grip.

She circled the tower, pretending to consider a different angle.

“The shoulder thing?” she muttered to Bellamy.

“I might have given him some tips to catch your eye,” he admitted so just she could hear.

“I hate you.”

“But think of all the basketball games you got to hear about.”

“I seriously hate you.”

“It’s March Madness, Clarke.”

“I’m going to murder you.”

“Stop stealing my clothes,” he hissed in her ear.

She was so mad that she grabbed a block impulsively, barely looking at it, and used the sound of the tower crumbling to the table as the perfect time to stomp on Bellamy’s foot, the crash covering up his groan of pain.

* * *

The drive home the next day was quiet and peaceful, with everyone pretty much exhausted from the weekend. Clarke and Bellamy had Dax and Monroe in their car again. Dax had tried to tell more sports stories, but thankfully Monroe had told him to pipe down. Dax had pouted for a bit, but now seemed to be working on something on his phone, or playing some sort of game, so Bellamy didn’t think that they had any more drama to worry about.

They dropped Dax and Monroe off at the apartment building where they both lived. Bellamy yawned as he closed the hatch to the back, watching the friends head through the main door with their bags. As he climbed back into the car, Clarke’s phone dinged.

“It’s from Dax,” she said, “maybe he forgot something.”

She opened the message and seemed to be reading it for a while, but only looked confused.

“What is it?” Bellamy asked.

“I’m not sure,” she replied honestly, handing it to Bellamy to read.

_Her hair, yellow, like the sun_

_And hot like the sun, too._

_Her eyes, blue, like the sky, and the water, and blueberries, and jeans._

_Two arms, two hands, ten fingers._

_One heart._

_She smiles and I feel butterflies_

_The orange ones_

_She laughs and I feel like flying_

_For real flying, not in an airplane_

_How do I tell her how I feel?_

_How do I tell her that this is real?_

_And if you like midnight driving with the windows down_

_And if you like going places we can’t even pronounce_

_If you like to do whatever you’ve been dreaming about_

_Then baby you’re perfect_

_Baby, you’re perfect_

_So let’s start right now_

Bellamy finished reading the text and was laughing so hard by the end that he could barely breathe. Luckily, Clarke had driven them away from the apartment parking lot while he read so there was no way Dax could see them. She pulled into a gas station so they could dissect the message.

“I might have told him you loved poetry,” Bellamy told her between gasps for air.

“Well thank you for that. Did he literally just list things that were blue?”

“And he gives you a thorough account of upper body parts, as well.”

“And the butterflies-”

“The _orange_ ones,” Bellamy added, sending them both into hysterics again.

“Those last few lines are familiar, what are those?” Clarke asked, pulling back her phone to google. “Oh my god, they’re One Direction lyrics!”

“Shut up – he just stuck actual One Direction lyrics into his poem?!”

Clarke shoved her phone at him so he could confirm.

After a few more minutes of laughing and pointing out their favorite parts, they finally settled down. Clarke started the car again and they began the short drive back to their house.

“So how are you going to respond?” Bellamy asked.

“I’m tempted to not respond at all, but I’m worried he’ll send me more verses.”

“One Direction has a huge canon.”

Clarke sighed.

“I probably have to let him down gently, don’t I?” she asked.

“It does seem like he actually put work into this.”

They worked out a plan as they drove home and Clarke sent the text as Bellamy carried their bags inside (his penance, she declared).

_Thank you for the beautiful words, Dax, but I’m not really looking for anything romantic right now. I really value our friendship and I can’t wait to see you at the bonfire next weekend!_

* * *

The following Tuesday, Bellamy received a text from “Eleanor” (Echo) and exchanged his and Clarke’s old burner phones for the new ones in a nearby park. He was sort of disappointed with the timing. He obviously wanted to call Octavia right away, but the museum’s new exhibit was opening that Friday and he had really hoped to tell her all about it.

He talked it over with Clarke that night over dinner.

“I’m sure you could still find plenty to talk about for twenty minutes,” Clarke teased him.

“I know,” he acknowledged, “but I hate having to wait a month to tell her about how the exhibit opening went – I’m really excited about it.”

“Well why don’t you just wait until Saturday, then? We have a week to use the phones before they deactivate.”

“But what if she needs me now?”

Clarke rolled her eyes.

“Octavia is an adult, Bellamy. She can look after herself. But I can make my phone calls tonight and you can chat with her for a few minutes, if you like. Trivia is cancelled for Murphy’s stupid vacation, anyway.”

Bellamy looked relieved.

“I’ll just say hi,” he assured her. “You shouldn’t have to give me extra time every month.”

Clarke rolled her eyes again but agreed.

That night, Clarke started by calling her mother and Wells, explaining to Bellamy that they usually went to bed earlier than Octavia, so she wanted to call them before it felt too late. He agreed, but he was restless knowing that he would get to talk to his sister soon.

He knew he was annoying Clarke while she talked. He left her alone in the living room, but was sure she could hear his pacing in the kitchen. It didn’t help that he popped his head into the living room roughly every three minutes to see if she was done yet.

Finally, Clarke stormed into the kitchen.

“Ok weirdo,” she began. “I was going to save the last five minutes for you, but I better make it the first five before you explode. I’m setting a timer on my phone – you better hand it over after five!”

Bellamy agreed and snagged the phone, dialing his sister immediately.

Just as Clarke had assured him, Octavia was, in fact, fine. She was actually mildly annoyed that her brother kept stealing her time with Clarke. Still, she humored her brother’s neediness and talked with him for five minutes before demanding time with Clarke.

Bellamy handed over the phone, trying not to pout. Clarke disappeared upstairs to gab.

He set to work cleaning up from dinner and washing the dishes. It took him a little while, and soon enough he realized that Clarke should have been off the phone by now. Typically they chatted after their phone calls, catching each other up on what they had learned from their friends and family and just sort of checking in with each other. Maybe they weren’t doing that this time because he hadn’t called anyone? Still, it seemed odd.

He decided to check to make sure everything was ok. He headed upstairs and knocked on Clarke’s door.

“Yeah?” Clarke called.

“Just checking in,” he said, feeling stupid. “Everything… alright?”

“Yup! Just catching up on emails,” she called back.

“Ok then,” he replied, rubbing the back of his neck. Feeling like he was getting a bit too clingy, he backed off for the rest of the night, retreating to his room to read.

* * *

Bellamy didn’t see much of Clarke the next day because she worked a 12-hour shift and then was asked to stay for another few hours after a nasty car accident on the highway resulted in a high number of injuries. When she got home, she was dead on her feet, so Bellamy didn’t blame her for shoveling food into her mouth in silence and then collapsing in her bed.

But he still didn’t see much of her on Thursday, and he was starting to think something was up. Was he just being paranoid, or was she avoiding him? Was he just getting clingy? Was she mad at him?

Luckily, the museum exhibit opening on Friday took up most of his attention, so he didn’t have much time to worry about Clarke. And she turned up for it, too, so clearly she wasn’t mad at him. The whole thing went really well and Luna even told him that several visitors had spoken to her about setting up times for bringing larger groups on tours. 

He couldn’t wait to call Octavia Saturday morning and tell her all about it. He knew she wasn’t an early riser, though, so he waited until it was 10:00 am her time (luckily only 8:00 am his time) to call her. The second he heard her voice, relief rushed through him. He was pretty sure that that was going to happen with every phone call. He told her all about the exhibit, from the initial ideas, to their work putting it together, to the positive reception they had received. Octavia was happy for him and asked lots of questions, which surprised Bellamy – she didn’t usually show that much of an interest in his work.

As it turned out, there was a reason she was being so overly nice.

She dropped the bomb on him with three minutes left in the conversation.

“So… I have something to tell you,” she began.

“What?” Bellamy asked nervously, thinking of the hundreds of impulsive decisions she had made in her life. _Please not another tattoo_ , he thought quickly.

“You know Lincoln from the FBI?”

“Yeah,” he replied, not following where this was going.

“He and I have sort of been… seeing each other.”

“WHAT?!”

“It just sort of happened! We really clicked when we were going through your apartment for stuff, and then we just kept talking, and he took me out to dinner, and Bell you would love him he is just the _sweetest_ guy…”

“He is like thirty years older than you!”

“He is _eight_ years older than me.”

“Still too many.”

“Clarke knew you were going to freak out.”

Bellamy froze. Clarke knew. She _knew_. This was why she had been avoiding him.

“You told Clarke?” he asked quietly.

“I did, but I made her promise not to tell you. I wanted to tell you myself.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Bell we only have a minute left. I promise he’s a great guy, and he treats me like a queen, and you’re going to love him.”

Bellamy scoffed.

“Fat chance. I love you, O, and I’m not going to end our conversation on a bad note, but just think more about this, ok? He’s too old for you, and being in the FBI means he’s probably a good liar, and maybe he even has a whole other secret family out there.”

Ok, so he knew he was reaching. But he was freaking out here.

Somehow he could hear Octavia rolling her eyes.

“We’re about to be cut off, Bell, but please don’t worry! I love-”

And the phone cut out.

She sure as hell better have been about to say “you” and not “him” or “Lincoln.”

Bellamy slammed the phone shut, which felt anticlimactic with the tiny flip phone. He didn’t care. All he could see was red.

He stormed downstairs and found Clarke pacing, wringing her hands. It briefly occurred to him that they had switched places from earlier in the week.

She looked up to meet his eyes and he could tell she was nervous as to how he was going to react. _She should be_ , he thought.

“How could you?” he demanded.

“Bell, she made me promise not to tell you.”

“I trusted you.”

“I had no other choice!”

“Of course you had another choice. How could you not tell me about this? You know it’s a terrible idea. He’s eight years older than her. She’s going to get hurt and you know it and you deliberately kept this from me.”

Now Clarke started to push back a little. She stopped pacing and her hands quickly found her hips.

“Your sister is an adult.”

“She’s 28!”

“You say that like I am not _literally_ the same age as her. She is an _adult_. Lincoln is a great guy who treats her well, respects her, and recognizes how awesome she is. You should be happy-”

“ _Happy?!_ I should be HAPPY? Happy that my sister is dating some enormous untrustworthy FBI agent and doesn’t even feel like she can tell me about it for, what, like two months? Happy that the person I’m living with – the person who’s supposed to be my ‘best friend,’ whatever bullshit that is, won’t even be honest with me?” He was shouting by now.

“You cannot seriously be angry with _me_ for this,” Clarke shot back.

“Oh, of course not, because no one can ever be angry with the princess.”

“Fuck you, Bellamy. Grow up and pull your head out of your ass.” She stormed away, marching up the stairs and slamming her door closed.

Bellamy moved to the sink and gripped it with both hands.

A tiny voice in the back of his head told him that he was being unfair to Clarke and just projecting his anger and frustration at being so far away from his sister onto her. But he told that tiny voice to shut up and put tape over its mouth and tied it up to some railroad tracks and shoved it in a box filled with rocks and threw it into the ocean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To-Do-List for this chapter: Make them friends for real, then DESTROY THE FRIENDSHIP. Check and check.
> 
> A couple things about me you probably caught from this chapter: I'm an actual professional history nerd (so sorry for all the details), and I'm obsessed with the Office (ala Jim's prank on Andy with tips for how to impress Pam).
> 
> I had the hardest time coming up with a title for this chapter and really just wanted to call it "The Orange Ones."
> 
> Really excited for the next chapter! The plot definitely starts moving. Should hopefully be up in 2 weeks!


	7. Things Get Tense

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I suck at chapter titles. It’s whatever. I had a hard time finishing this, given the burning dumpster fire that is the actual show, but I think we’re all feeling pretty bummed/misled/irate/disappointed right now, so at least we can feel our feelings together. God, is even the word “together” ruined now? NO. WE WON’T SURRENDER IT. AO3 is the new canon!

Bellamy Fucking Blake. BELLAMY FUCKING BLAKE. Clarke was going to kill him. She was going to throw him in the trunk of the car and drive back to Arkadia and hand-deliver him to the Wallaces. Hell, she was going to take care of it for them before she could even drive that far.

These were the thoughts that occupied Clarke’s mind as she paced outside the locked bathroom on Wednesday morning. She peered at her watch again – fifteen minutes until she absolutely had to leave if she wanted to get to work just barely on time. Bellamy knew her work schedule, _knew_ she needed to shower, and had no need to shower himself, because he had the _day off_. She knew that this was intentional.

They had been fighting the whole week, really ever since his phone call to Octavia the previous Saturday. After exploding on her for something that was so completely not her fault that it was frankly _ridiculous_ , Bellamy hadn’t spoken to her since. He hadn’t even stayed in the same room with her.

Clarke was used to fighting with Bellamy – she had nearly twenty years of practice, after all – but this was different. Previously, “fighting” meant that they called each other names, pranked each other, mocked or deliberately annoyed each other. But never, never had they ended up in a situation like this, where they were completely and totally not speaking to each other. Clarke understood the irony of the situation – the only way to get to this point was to actually build a real friendship first, which they had somehow done in the last few months. But that was all shot to hell now, so totally irrelevant.

It had become clear within hours of his phone call to Octavia that Bellamy intended to dig in his heels on this. Clarke had rolled her eyes at first, cooking dinner and waiting for him to slip in with his tail between his legs to apologize for shouting at her, but he had never turned up. She had put the leftovers in the fridge – a peace offering – but he hadn’t touched them all week. His loss, really.

But Bellamy wasn’t the only one good at avoiding contact. Clarke had signed up for extra evening shifts at the hospital, even working Tuesday night and skipping trivia. She had scheduled her time off for days she knew he would be working so that she would see him as little as possible. For four days now, they had each acted as if the other one didn’t exist, cooking and eating separately, only venturing to the shared bathroom when they were sure the other one was in their room or not home at all, and avoiding the shared living areas almost entirely.

But this – taking a 45-minute shower the morning he _knew_ Clarke needed to get out the door for work – this was taking it to a new level. Bellamy had moved from a defensive strategy to an offensive one, and Clarke was infuriated.

She wanted to pound on the door and tell him to hurry up, but that would mean talking to him, and she refused to be the first to break.

She looked at her watch. 12 minutes left. Fuck it, she would shower at the hospital really quickly before her shift started. She threw her change of clothes in a bag, along with her hairbrush and makeup, and ran downstairs. Before slamming the front door on her way out, she made one quick pit stop to the basement to shut off the hot water heater.

Take that, asshole.

* * *

Eight hours later, Clarke was dead on her feet. It had been a busy day and every time she thought she was going to get a break, Jackson or Nyko paged her back to another room. She was now on her way out to the waiting room to share some good news with a family whose son had broken his leg falling out of a tree at recess. This was one of her favorite parts of the job.

She turned the corner into the waiting room and quickly spotted the family. The two mothers leapt to their feet, realizing immediately that Clarke’s presence meant _news_. Their daughter, who couldn’t be older than four, was asleep spread across a few seats and Clarke was careful not to wake her.

“He’s going to be fine,” she started with, opting to jump right into the good news. The parents immediately let out enormous exhales and grabbed each other’s hands. Clarke continued to explain the situation to them, letting them know what the doctors had done in surgery, when their son would be waking up, and when they could expect him to return home. She told them she would check in with them again tomorrow to talk through a recovery plan, knowing that there was no way they could absorb that information right now.

“Thank you so much, Doctor Smith,” one of the women told her, with the other nodding in agreement.

“Thank _you_ for trusting us with your son,” Clarke replied, using one of her favorite lines.

She explained to one of the women how to get to the son’s hospital room while the other gently woke their daughter. She smiled as she watched the family head down the hallway and took a deep breath, briefly grateful for this insane, exhausting, rewarding job.

She spun around, prepared to head down the opposite hallway to check on some charts, when something caught her eye. She turned back to the waiting room and scanned the people sitting there, trying to find him. Her pulse had quickened. She didn’t see him, but she could have sworn…

There. He was right there.

Suddenly her pager went off and she instinctively looked down to grab it. When she looked back up, the man was gone. She couldn’t have looked away for more than three seconds – how could he have completely disappeared in that time? She scanned the waiting room furiously, not even reading the page she had received, but still didn’t see him.

She swallowed heavily, convincing herself that she must have been imagining things. No one could disappear that quickly. She checked the page, seeing that Nyko needed to go over some x-rays with her. She did one final scan of the room, took a deep breath, and headed down the hallway to find Nyko.

It must just be the long shift, after a week of long shifts. And the stress with her roommate situation certainly wasn’t helping.

That was the only explanation for why she thought she had seen Carl Emerson – one of the hitmen there the night of the murder in Arkadia – sitting in the waiting room of her emergency department in Shallow Valley.

* * *

Clarke only knew Carl Emerson’s name from Sergeant Pike. After she and Bellamy had looked through the photographs and marked the two men that they recognized, Pike had shared their names: Carl Emerson and Thomas Lovejoy. They were two of Cage Wallace’s top deputies and highly dangerous men. The problem was that they were also insanely ordinary looking. They were both men of average height and build. Emerson had light brown hair, while Lovejoy had dark blonde. They had no remarkable facial features, nor anything to truly distinguish them. And now Clarke was living in Montana, surrounded by the most light-brown-haired and dark-blonde-haired white people she had ever seen.

There was a high likelihood that she had just seen a man that looked like Emerson. A _beyond_ high likelihood. Even if Emerson had tracked them down, why would he show up in a crowded hospital waiting room? The Wallaces had nothing to gain by intimidating Clarke and Bellamy; all they needed was to kill them, and they could do that far more easily at their house.

Clarke shook _that_ thought from her mind as quickly as she could.

It was nothing and she was overreacting. She hadn’t seen Emerson, for goodness sake. It was a long shift, on a long day, in a long week. She was stressed out and furious with her roommate, but she was safe. They were in the _middle of nowhere_. Of course she was safe.

* * *

By the time Clarke made it home that night, she had forgotten all about the man in the waiting room. Her joy at sharing good news with that young boy’s family had been short-lived and she had spent the rest of the day racing from one crisis to another. It took all of her mental energy to park her car on the curb and stumble into the house, shove some food into her mouth hole, and throw herself onto her bed.

The next day, she woke up and stretched, peering out the window at the view of the mountains that would never get old. She yawned and thought through her itinerary for the day. She was working an evening shift and didn’t need to be at the hospital until 6:00 pm. A quick glance at her phone told her it was only 8:00 am now. Bellamy was working today, so she should have the house to herself. She could hear him getting ready and stayed in her room, knowing he was normally out the door by 8:15. She didn’t want to ruin her day off by seeing his stupid scowling face.

She knew exactly what she wanted to do today with the house to herself – _paint_. She had been itching to turn the sketch she had made during their hike into something bigger and more colorful, and she could practically feel her hands gliding over the canvas. She walked over to her closet and peered into her painting supplies. She was critically low on a few of her favorite colors, and a couple of her brushes had disappeared or broken during the move.

She pulled up her phone and did a quick search to find out if there were any art supply stores within a nearby radius. She wasn’t optimistic, but found herself pleasantly surprised when a google search turned up a result. Apparently there was a store 3.6 miles away called “The Art Supply Store.” _Perfect_.

By the time she finished looking up directions and planning her day, she heard her asshole of a roommate head out the front door. She waited another minute or two to make sure he wasn’t coming back before she emerged from her room to get ready for the day. Before taking a shower, she checked the hot water heater in the basement to make sure Bellamy hadn’t enacted the same kind of revenge. It was on, but there was a post-it note stuck to it. “You are the worst,” it said. She rolled her eyes before balling it up to throw it away.

A few hours later, she found herself walking through the door of The Art Supply Store. A small bell dinged and she looked around the store, getting her bearings. It was small, but she thought it was probably big enough to have what she was looking for. She started down an aisle, eavesdropping on a customer checking out a few feet away.

“Did you find everything you were looking for?” the woman behind the cash register asked in a bored, monotone voice that let Clarke know she didn’t really care about the customer’s shopping experience.

“Almost everything,” the customer said. “I was hoping you had the green painter’s tape instead of the blue – I’ve heard it does a better job of coming off a canvas without leaving marks.”

“Mmm,” the cashier responded, very clearly not listening.

“Do you think you could order some of the green?” the customer asked.

“Probably not,” the cashier replied, without a hint of apology.

“I guess I could check at the art shop in Moose Ridge,” the customer responded, and Clarke vaguely recalled driving through that town on their way to the cabin a few weeks earlier. It was about an hour away, if she remembered correctly. A long way to drive for tape. “That store has the cutest name! Have you heard of it? It’s called ‘A Brush With Destiny.’ Isn’t that clever?”

The cashier did not look amused. The customer continued, undeterred.

“I bet there are all kinds of fun names for an art store like this. And I bet a creative name would really appeal to your clientele!”

The cashier handed the customer her receipt and a paper bag with the materials she had just purchased.

“We sell art supplies,” she said in a clipped voice, and Clarke guessed she answered this question a lot. “Our name tells customers exactly what we do. That is its purpose. Have a nice day.” With that, the cashier disappeared into the back.

The customer, clearly affronted, gathered her bag and headed out in a huff.

Clarke couldn’t explain it, but she liked the woman behind the counter. She had seen enough punny art stores to last her a lifetime and there was something about the woman’s no-nonsense approach that had Clarke smiling in spite of herself.

No longer distracted by the conversation, Clarke added paints and brushes to her basket. The store had a brand of acrylics she had never seen before and Clarke picked out a couple of tubes to try it out. Looking at the back of the packaging, it seemed to be a local company, which appealed to Clarke. After finding what she had come for, she wandered through the rest of the store. The aisles were filled with the classic materials: pencils, a wide assortment of paper sizes and types, paints, easels, palettes, pastels – that kind of thing.

In the back of the store, Clarke was surprised to find an area set up for people to work. There were easels covered in paint and charcoal, clearly not for sale. There were a couple of comfortable chairs facing a beautiful window. As Clarke admired the space, she caught sight of the woman from earlier who had been working behind the register.

“Is this space for anyone to work in?” Clarke asked.

“Yup,” the woman replied, “though we don’t get many takers.”

Clarke couldn’t understand why more people didn’t work here. The lighting was perfect and the view from the window was spectacular. She smiled at one easel in particular that seemed the perfect height for her. She had the house to herself today, and she worked Friday, but Bellamy would be home all weekend and it would be great to escape here when she wasn’t working. She knew immediately that she would be here Saturday morning.

She moved to the register to check out and saw the cashier properly for the first time. She was clearly pregnant – Clarke would guess 5 or 6 months along.

“Congratulations,” Clarke said timidly, gesturing to the woman’s stomach.

“Thank you.”

“How far along, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Five months, more or less,” the woman replied, “though it feels like I’ve been pregnant for hundreds of years at this point.”

Clarke laughed and the cashier gave a small smirk.

“I’m Clarke Smith,” she offered, noticing how easily the lie came now. “I’m a doctor at Shadow Valley Hospital.”

“Charmaine Diyoza, but call me Diyoza,” the other woman replied. “I own the store.”

“I’m happy to find such a great shop in town – I just moved here a few months ago.”

“Well, Clarke Smith,” Diyoza replied, packing Clarke’s purchases into a paper bag and handing them to her, along with a receipt, “don’t be a stranger.”

“I won’t,” Clarke promised, before flashing her a smile on her way out.

* * *

Sure enough, Clarke returned to The Art Supply Store Saturday morning. Her day painting at home had been wonderful and had reinvigorated her passion for the craft. She had also been impressed by the local paint brand and was looking forward to trying more of their products. She and Bellamy were still not speaking, but her shift the day before had spared her from any awkward encounters. She had woken up early this morning and gotten out the door before he had even returned from his run.

The bell dinged again on her way in and Diyoza looked up from the counter, giving Clarke a nod of recognition. Clarke smiled in response and headed to the workspace in the back.

She dropped her bag at her feet and set her canvas up carefully at the easel she had admired two days before. She was right about the height, too – it was perfect for her. She eyed the canvas and took stock of where she had left off on Thursday. A big part of her day had been spent just sketching on the canvas and she had laid part of the background colors. She would need to start there today, though. She reached into her bag for her palette, brushes, and the appropriate colors she would need.

Soon, she was totally set up and ready to paint. She took a deep, calming breath and smiled as her brush swept across the canvas.

She was just getting into her groove a few minutes later when a voice behind her made her jump.

“Are you sure that’s the blue you want?” Diyoza asked.

“Yes, quite sure,” Clarke replied politely.

“I just think that if you mixed in a bit of ultramarine it would make the whole thing more dynamic.”

“I think I’m going to stick with what I have, thank you.”

Clarke assumed that would be the end of it. She was wrong. Diyoza sat herself in one of the comfortable chairs and continued to watch Clarke paint. Clarke turned around a few times to see if Diyoza was reading a book or something, but no, she was just watching Clarke. She started to feel very paranoid.

And the questions didn’t stop with the blue suggestions.

“What size brush are you using? I think you want a smaller one for that tree line.”

“You’re not taping off the edges? Bold choice.”

“If you mix a little sepia into that the shadows will pop more.”

Thirty minutes into her painting, Clarke was losing her mind. She could definitely tell why people didn’t paint here.

Luckily, she was saved by a customer who needed Diyoza’s assistance. Clarke looked over her shoulder and tried to gauge whether she had time to pack up all of her supplies and leave before Diyoza returned. She had just started to slip her unwashed brushes into her bag when Diyoza called out “Clarke, don’t leave. I have more thoughts on that gray you’re mixing.”

Clarke rolled her eyes and returned her brushes to the easel.

Why did she listen to Diyoza and stay? Was it her natural instinct to please people? Was it because she would rather endure Diyoza’s badgering and questions than Bellamy’s door slams and scowls? Was it so she wouldn’t burn a bridge with the owner of her new favorite shop in town?

Probably all three.

Either way, Clarke spent the day painting in Diyoza’s shop with a very attentive (and critical) audience member. Luckily, the shop’s business picked up later in the morning and continued into the afternoon, so Clarke had a few long breaks to concentrate. She tried to slip out at lunch, but Diyoza assured her she could leave her canvas and supplies there and return afterwards, and Clarke succumbed to the pressure.

Now it was 5:00, the store was closing, and Clarke was finally free.

“I can stay late tonight if you want to keep going,” Diyoza offered.

“No, no, I think I’m all painted out for the day,” Clarke replied quickly.

“Will you be back tomorrow?”

“I don’t think I can – I have to work,” Clarke explained, suddenly grateful for her atypical work schedule.

Diyoza looked crestfallen for a moment, but her face quickly resumed its typical neutral expression. Clarke briefly considered that she would make an incredible poker player.

“Well I’ll see you next time. We can work on your scale issues.”

Clarke gritted her teeth and thanked her before slipping out the door.

* * *

She made it to her car quickly and set her canvas carefully on the floor in the backseat. She flipped through the radio stations as she started to drive down the road. Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw a dark car following her, but didn’t pay it any mind. She turned right to head towards her house, but then suddenly remembered she had wanted to stop by the grocery store for a few things, so she dipped down a small side street to turn around.

When she looked in her mirror, she saw that the same dark car was still following her. This was odd, but not alarming. The driver had sunglasses on and she couldn’t really make out any details. She kept driving, now heading to the store, but couldn’t stop glancing in the mirror. She knew she was just being ridiculous, but it almost felt like the car was… following her.

She was being ridiculous. To console herself, she turned onto another small side street. The car followed. She tried to stay at a normal speed and plan a new route. She had no idea where she was, but most of these streets connected in a predictable grid. She turned left, and the car followed again. Finally, she turned right and the car behind her drove on without turning. She pulled over and took a deep breath. _See, he wasn’t following you_. She was just being paranoid.

She put the car in Drive again, navigated her way (with only two wrong turns) back to the main road, and finished her trip to the store.

* * *

Luckily, Clarke’s shift at the hospital lasted most of Sunday, so she didn’t have to spend the day with Bellamy, who was showing no signs of apologizing anytime soon. Monday was tense with both of them trying to eat dinner at the same time but decidedly not _together_.

And then came Tuesday.

Roan messaged them early Tuesday morning, asking them to be home at 4:00 without offering an explanation. Clarke’s shift ended at 2:00, so she was fine. Bellamy got permission from Luna to close an hour early; they didn’t have any tour groups that day, so it wasn’t a big deal. Now, at a few minutes to 4:00, they sat in the living room, still refusing to speak to or make eye contact with each other. Bellamy kept his eyes trained on the window, while Clarke picked at her nails. It had been over a week now since they had had a civil conversation; the relaxation and pranks of the cabin seemed a lifetime ago.

Finally, a dark green Jeep parked on the street and Roan and Echo stepped out. They appeared casual, just stopping by to visit friends, but Clarke could tell Echo was carefully monitoring their surroundings and Roan kept his eyes trained on the front door. Bellamy opened the door before they even had the chance to knock and quickly ushered them in.

“What is it?” he asked quickly. “Has something happened?”

“Yes and no,” Roan answered unhelpfully after checking to make sure that the door was securely closed behind him. “Nothing that concerns you, but we’ve been asked to do an extra sweep of all of our safehouses, just to make sure that everything is still secure.”

“This happens every so often,” Echo added, and that calmed Clarke down a bit. “It’s not a big deal, but we take it seriously.”

“What do you need us to do?” Clarke asked.

“Gather up your electronics and bring them all here. Other than that, we just need you to stay out of the way while we perform the sweep.”

Bellamy and Clarke gathered their things and brought them for Roan to inspect. Echo headed upstairs to start checking for anything out of the ordinary.

Roan scanned their electronics, typing in some sort of code and nodding at something. Clarke couldn’t tell what was going on, but he at least looked pleased.

Echo ducked back into the living room.

“Did Lincoln mention whether we’re supposed to do window exteriors today too?” she asked.

At the mention of Lincoln, Bellamy bristled, but Roan ignored him.

“Yeah, he said to try to look from the inside but not do too much on the exterior. We don’t want to draw more attention. We’ll do the ground floor ones when we’re checking the grounds. For the upstairs ones just try to get a good angle from the inside.”

Echo nodded and returned to her task.

“What are you looking for on the windows?” Clarke asked.

“All manner of things,” Roan replied, bored. “Bugs, devices left to keep windows wedged open so they can be used for break-ins, even just marks to signal to others that this is your house.”

Roan turned to Bellamy, who was still looking prickly.

“What’s your deal, Blake?” he asked.

“He’s upset that Lincoln is dating his sister,” Clarke explained.

“Octavia?” Echo asked, rejoining them in the living room again and reaching into her bag for something.

“Yes, Octavia,” Bellamy grumbled through gritted teeth.

“Lincoln’s a great guy – you have nothing to worry about,” Echo assured him.

“I don’t care if he’s Mother fucking Theresa,” Bellamy spit back. “I don’t like the power dynamic of it. I don’t like the idea that she could feel compelled to stay with him just so that he does his job and keeps me safe.”

“I’m actually with Bellamy on this one,” Roan surprised Clarke by agreeing. “I think it’s shitty. I’m working on getting him reassigned and getting a new agent on your case. Lincoln is a great guy, I agree with Echo, but I still don’t like the optics of it.”

“Isn’t this breaking some kind of rule?” Bellamy asked, perking up now that he had a supporter.

“It should be, but our director doesn’t really enforce rules,” Roan replied.

“Or at least not all of the rules,” Echo countered. She found what she was looking for and returned upstairs.

Roan finished with their devices and returned them to Clarke and Bellamy.

“These are all clean,” he told them. “And nice job of staying off social media, by the way. Our team has only found two photos of you so far, and we handled both of them quickly.”

Clarke was stunned – she didn’t think any photos of them had appeared anywhere.

“What photos?” she asked.

“I think it’s from some pub trivia thing? In one, you’re carrying two beers in the background of a team photo, and in another we can see both of you sitting in a booth, again in the background of a different team’s photo.”

Clarke was stunned – she hadn’t even thought of that. Before she could stammer out a response, though, Roan cut her off.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s nearly impossible to stay totally off the grid these days. We have tech teams to do this work.”

Clarke nodded.

“You two sit tight,” Roan told them. “We’ll need you for the exterior, but let us just handle the interior for now.”

Clarke and Bellamy sat in the living room (still not speaking to each other) while Roan and Echo poked and prodded in every corner of their house. Clarke felt a little insecure about its state of cleanliness, but there was nothing she could do about that now.

Looking over at Bellamy, she did feel a tinge of guilt. She hadn’t even thought about the power dynamics at play in Octavia’s relationship. She always just thought of Octavia as so strong, assertive, and independent, but Bellamy had obviously known her since she was born, and clearly had a different perspective. While his overprotectiveness was obnoxious, in this case she did have to concede that he had a point.

Still, that didn’t excuse how he handled the situation, and _especially_ didn’t excuse how he had spoken to Clarke. He had no reason to take his frustration out on her and she had done nothing wrong. Octavia was one of her best friends and she had every right to keep a secret for her. Bellamy still had a lot to apologize for and, judging by how actively he was avoiding looking at her right now, he didn’t intend to do so anytime soon.

After another twenty minutes or so, Roan and Echo concluded their search of the interior of the home.

“All clean,” Echo told them.

“We need to move outside,” Roan announced, “but we need it to appear as if nothing unusual is happening. On move-in day, we established that I’m Clarke’s older cousin. We’re going to stick with that story. Echo is here as my girlfriend.”

Echo quirked an eyebrow.

“We’re looking around outside because you two are interested in making new landscaping choices and Echo has experience with plants. We’re going to be talking a bunch of nonsense about plants the whole time we’re out there. Here are the important things to pay attention to. If either of us mentions ‘morning glory,’ that means we think we’re being watched by someone, not necessarily anyone suspicious, but someone nonetheless. If someone mentions ‘lavender,’ that means there is an immediate danger and we need to return inside as quickly and normally as possible.”

Clarke gulped.

“We’re trying to prepare you, but we have no reason to believe there is any immediate danger,” Echo assured them.

The foursome moved outside. Clarke was impressed by how seriously it appeared Roan and Echo were taking the landscaping discussion.

“Have you thought about adding a boxwood here?” Roan asked, examining a corner of their house.

“But how would that affect the light?” Echo asked, moving towards the windows.

The conversation continued as they looped around the house. Roan and Echo used excuses of soil, drainage, invasive species, and weird funguses that Clarke was pretty sure they made up to get a close view of the windows, foundation, and exterior walls.

At one point Roan mentioned something about morning glory and Clarke quickly looked around, trying to appear casual. She spotted Raven next door, walking to her car.

Clarke waved and called hello to her, in part to reassure Roan that Raven was safe and in part to keep up the façade that everything was normal.

Raven waved back and got into her car.

No one called ‘Lavender,’ but after fifteen or twenty minutes they had finished the tour and headed inside anyway.

After making sure that the door was firmly closed behind him, Roan turned on the pair.

“Everything looks good,” he told them. “One of us will be in touch in a couple of weeks to get you your new phones.”

Clarke and Bellamy nodded.

“Should we be worried about whatever incident prompted this search?” Clarke asked.

Echo and Roan exchanged a look. Echo turned to them and her face read total assurance that Clarke didn’t trust for a second. “Definitely not. Everything’s fine.”

Clarke gave her a thin-lipped smile in response and she could tell that Echo didn’t believe her. Echo nodded in response. Roan and Bellamy didn’t follow everything exchanged between the two women, but they didn’t really need to.

Roan and Echo weren’t people to linger, so they quickly said their goodbyes and left.

Bellamy and Clarke were left in the living room together. Clarke was tempted to say something about Lincoln, about how she agreed with his point about the power relationship, but found it hard to form words. Bellamy didn’t wait around, either.

“I’m going for a run before dinner,” he announced before disappearing.

Clarke sighed and headed to the kitchen, deciding to use his time out of the house to prepare her own food.

* * *

They had trivia that night, of course, and Clarke wasn’t sure what they were going to do about it.

Clarke had skipped it the week before to stay away from Bellamy, volunteering to cover a shift at the hospital so she had a ready-made excuse. But she didn’t want to do that again. It was _his_ turn to skip.

He didn’t seem ready to back down, though. At 6:30, Clarke gathered her jacket and purse to head to the car and Bellamy kept pace behind her. They still didn’t speak to each other.

Clarke climbed into the driver’s seat, as she always did, and the two buckled themselves in. She took a deep breath before starting the car. She wanted to be able to focus on this conversation, so she needed to start it before she was driving.

“So how do we act tonight?” she asked him. Bellamy kept his eyes trained on his window and all he offered her in response was a shrug.

Clarke rolled her eyes and gripped the steering wheel.

“You’re such an asshole. I seriously don’t know how anyone stands you. _What is the plan for tonight?”_ she hissed out the last question, her rage clear.

Bellamy scrubbed a hand over his face and finally turned to look at her.

“Have you told anyone we’re fighting?” he asked.

“Do you mean ‘have I told anyone that my roommate is acting like an immature jackass who needs to grow up and get over himself?’”

“ _Have you told anyone?”_ Now he was the one seething.

“No.”

“I haven’t either. And I don’t really want to explain it and have Raven or Jasper try to make us make nice or some other bullshit like that.”

“So we just fake it?” Clarke asked.

“Yeah. Should be easy for you, given how good you are at lying.”

Clarke itched to slap him for that one, but she merely turned the car on in silence. She wouldn’t let him see that he had gotten to her.

When they got to the bar, they both tried to school their faces into neutral expressions and quickly greeted their friends. Clarke went up to get the first round (Murphy was luckily serving her again) and, when she returned to the table, she was pleased to see that Bellamy had chosen a seat between Monty and Raven, far from the remaining seat left for Clarke between Monroe and Jasper. She passed him his drink with a fake smile before settling in and greeting her friends.

For the first couple of rounds, they were able to maintain the illusion that everything was fine. There were enough people there that it didn’t seem abnormal that they weren’t speaking to each other. Clarke chatted with Monroe about work and the latest episodes of Top Chef. Bellamy stayed busy with Monty and Raven.

But then came the third round, and the topic was literature. To everyone else at the table, it seemed innocuous, but Bellamy and Clarke lowered their eyes at each other.

In spite of the fact that they had fought almost relentlessly for the past eighteen years, there really wasn’t much that Bellamy and Clarke actually disagreed on. They shared nearly identical progressive political views. Neither cared much for religion, but didn’t feel passionately enough about it to be “against” it. Bellamy hated income inequity more than Clarke, but she didn’t disagree that it was a serious problem. Clarke cared more about healthcare than Bellamy did, but he trusted her opinions to be right and valid in that area. Neither was too invested in sports. Their musical tastes differed, but they both agreed that modern country music was trash, and that seemed to be all that mattered.

But there was one thing they _always_ disagreed on, and that thing was literature. Clarke loved science fiction, while Bellamy scorned anything written after 1900. When Bellamy waxed poetic about _Wuthering Heights_ , Clarke responded by casting Heathcliff as a desperate, abusive sociopath (which, to be fair, he WAS). When Clarke tried for the thirtieth time to get him to read Ursula Le Guin, Bellamy dismissed her work as “space garbage.” (Clarke had physically choked in pain at that.)

Now, the two knew that this trivia round was going to be the test of their façade for the evening.

“I’m going to go get a drink,” Bellamy announced. That was probably a good idea.

The first two questions were simple: “Name all three Bronte sisters” and “What cartoon character appeared on Robert Langdon’s watch in the Dan Brown novels?”

Clarke thought it was a little suspect to consider the Robert Langdon novels “literature,” but she kept that opinion to herself, lest she be labeled a snob.

Bellamy was back by the third question, and as soon as it was asked, she wished he wasn’t.

“Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, has had many of its archaeological features named after planets and terms from which science fiction series?” Murphy read.

The question wasn’t hard, and Clarke wrote “Dune” before Raven could, eager to answer something before the genius _for once_.

But Bellamy, seemingly out of instinct, choked out “are we really considering science fiction ‘literature’ now?”

“You missed the Robert Langdon question,” Monty replied, “I think Murphy is defining the term loosely.”

“Science fiction is absolutely literature. Just because it wasn’t all written before the invention of the fucking _printing press_ doesn’t mean that it isn’t literature,” Clarke spat back.

Raven started to agree with Clarke, but immediately noticed the fire between Clarke and Bellamy.

“Woah, what’s going on with you two?” she asked.

Murphy asked another question, but it was an easy one and Harper wrote down the answer quickly, not wanting to distract the group from the stare-down taking place at the table.

“Nothing,” Clarke tried to say breezily. Bellamy simply sat back and took a long pull at his beer.

“That bad, huh?” Raven asked with a smirk. “We were all wondering when you would get sick of each other.”

“It’s nothing. We’re just going a little stir-crazy,” Clarke quickly lied. She glared at Bellamy, willing him to do something to corroborate her account, or at least act like less of a raging asshole. Finally, he set his beer down.

“Yeah, just going through some growing pains,” he said with a noncommittal shrug.

Raven didn’t seem convinced, but the next few questions were tough and required the team’s full attention, so she let it drop.

Bellamy insisted he knew the answer to the last question, but Clarke was sure he was wrong. It was a Dickens question, which was in his normal wheelhouse, but she had written a report on this book in high school and remembered the Sparknotes distinctly. The group voted on Bellamy’s answer and he eyed her smugly as he wrote it down.

“Your funeral,” she retorted.

Of course, Clarke was right. Maybe that would teach them to listen to her. Making matters worse, they lost by one point at the end of the night. Of course, they missed other questions and there wasn’t really one specific one that lost the game for them, but both Bellamy and Clarke knew that the Dickens one was one they should have had.

Luckily, after the round on literature the pair managed to pull their attitudes together enough to fool their friends for the rest of the evening. Bellamy bought Clarke a drink and teased her about needing to learn how to drive in the snow soon, so the group could easily forget their minor explosion earlier in the night.

As they left the bar together after trivia had ended, Clarke debated whether to mock Bellamy about the missed Dickens question. To be fair, she had been _right_ , and had he listened to her, they would have _won_. She also knew, though, that bringing it up would only make him more of a dick. But it was so hard to pass up…

She weighed her options as they walked down the sidewalk, Bellamy glum at her side. She dug through her purse for the keys before looking up to remember where she had parked. She had just spotted their vehicle when-

There.

He was right there.

Emerson.

Clarke screamed and dropped the keys. Bellamy instantly reacted in a panic, trying to figure out what was wrong. He reached down for the keys and accidentally bumped her in the process, forcing her to look down out of instinct.

When she looked back up, he was gone. She couldn’t even really figure out exactly where he had been. She could have sworn he had been standing a few cars over, but now that she looked there, it seemed impossible. Why would a person have just been standing in a parking lot at 10:00 at night? And how could he have disappeared so quickly?

“What’s wrong?” Bellamy asked, still trying to determine the source of her panic.

“I thought I saw… I thought I saw…” Clarke stammered out, but couldn’t finish her sentence. She took a deep breath, trying to rationalize with herself.

It couldn’t be him. She must have just imagined it. She was tired and the earlier incident from the week prior was still floating around in her mind.

“It’s nothing. Nevermind,” Clarke told him dismissively before grabbing the keys.

Bellamy didn’t look convinced, but he also didn’t want to talk to her, so he climbed into the car and they drove home in silence.

When they got home, they both started getting ready for bed, exhausted from the full day. Clarke changed into her pajamas, washed off her makeup, and brushed her teeth. She plugged her phone in to charge on the nightstand next to her bed and climbed beneath the covers. 

Looking up, she realized Echo had opened the curtains during her inspection. Clarke groaned, knowing she had to climb out of bed again. Her window faced East and looked over the backyard, so if she left her curtains open she would get a face full of sun way before she had to be up: she had the morning off tomorrow and fully intended to sleep in.

She grudgingly climbed out of bed and walked sleepily to the window. She pulled the left curtain closed and reached for the right, looking out at the yard in the process.

She screamed.

There he was, standing on the other side of the fence that marked the end of their yard, leaning over it with his elbows. A cigarette dangled from his mouth. At her scream, his mouth stretched into a smile and he lifted his right hand, pointed his finger like a gun, and mimed shooting her.

Bellamy was in her room within seconds, just as panicked as earlier, but this time the man didn’t disappear before he could see him. Bellamy got to the window just in time to see the man point his finger at Clarke, then take a casual step backwards and _walk_ away calmly, as if nothing could phase him.

Clarke felt her blood run cold.

“Holy fuck was that-”

“Emerson? Yeah, I think so. That’s the fourth time I’ve seen him in two weeks.”

“Why the fuck didn’t you say anything?!” Bellamy demanded, but Clarke was busy with her phone.

“I just texted the ‘Home’ number, so hopefully we hear from one of the agents soon. And I didn’t tell you because we haven’t exactly been speaking.” Her voice was calm but her hands were shaking, and she knew Bellamy could see it.

He pulled her away from the window and they looked around, unsure of where they could go.

“You could have told me this,” he hissed back at her. She wasn’t sure why they were suddenly whispering, but it felt appropriate.

“I told myself I was seeing things. I never saw him for more than a second. One time it was just a suspicious car.”

“Jesus, Clarke,” Bellamy uttered, running his hand over his face. “Let’s go downstairs and check all of the doors.”

As they walked down the steps, Clarke’s phone rang and the noise caused them both to jump and nearly fall down the stairs. She answered immediately.

“Clarke? It’s Roan. What’s going on?”

“There was a man in our yard – I saw him from the window. It was Emerson, I’m pretty sure. One of Cage’s guys. I’ve… uh… I think I’ve seen him a couple of times recently.”

“Why the fuck are we just hearing about this now?!”

“I didn’t think it was real! I never got a good look at him.”

“We’re on our way. Luckily Echo and I are still in the area – we’ll be right over.”

They hung up and Clarke filled Bellamy in. They sat in the living room, nervously waiting for Roan and Echo to arrive. They didn’t have long to wait; within ten minutes, there was a knock on their door.

Bellamy let the pair in and Clarke immediately noticed that their appearances had significantly changed from earlier in the day. When they had acted as Clarke’s cousin and his girlfriend, the pair had worn casual jeans and sweatshirts; now they were dressed all in black, clearly ready for action.

“Show me what you saw,” Roan instantly demanded, wasting no time. Clarke quickly led the group to her bedroom, talking the whole way. She told them about the hospital waiting room, the car that followed her after she left the art store, and the sight in the parking lot earlier that night. At the last one, she noticed Bellamy clenching his hands into fists.

When they got to her window, she and Bellamy both pointed to the fence and explained what they saw.

“I’ll go see what I can find outside,” Echo told them.

“You sure I shouldn’t do it?” Roan asked.

“We both know I’m better at staying unseen.” With that, she was gone.

Roan walked them through their stories a couple more times, drawing out as many details as he could. They moved back downstairs and he did another lap of their house, checking doors and windows. He closed all of the blinds and curtains.

“You’re positive it was Emerson?” he asked.

“No,” Clarke replied honestly. Bellamy said nothing. “It was dark, and he’s just a guy of average build with brown hair – there was nothing about this guy that I could point to as definitive proof it was him.”

“But you think it was?” Roan’s intense eye contact told her he trusted her gut.

She nodded confidently. “I’m sure of it.”

They continued to wait for Echo and Roan wrote down the details of Clarke’s earlier sightings, including the details of the car. He stepped away to make a few hushed phone calls; Clarke wasn’t able to eavesdrop anything useful.

Finally, after at least thirty minutes, Echo quietly returned. Roan hung up his phone and joined them in the living room.

“Anything?” he asked.

Echo shook her head. “Long gone by now. But I did find cigarette butts by the fence.”

“Can’t we send them to some lab or something?” Bellamy asked.

“We will, but if it’s him, we won’t get a match,” Echo explained. “He won’t be in the system.”

“What do we do now? We obviously move, right?” Clarke asked.

Echo looked at Roan.

“I’m afraid not,” Roan told them. Bellamy and Clarke stared at him, aghast.

“That was Emerson out there! I _know_ it was!” Bellamy blurted, trying to keep his voice down.

“We have no proof,” Roan stated calmly. “I’ve been on the phone with the agency for the past fifteen minutes. We have no solid proof that it was Emerson, and nothing else indicates that anyone has discovered your whereabouts. Even our inside agent has detected nothing.”

“No,” Clarke muttered, “you can’t keep us here. He knows where we are.”

“I know,” Roan told her, “but there’s nothing we can do. We also have to assume that if that was Emerson, that they’re watching you, and that if we do move you, they’ll easily find you.”

“So what the fuck do we do now?” Bellamy asked.

“Stay here, lay low, keep eyes out at all times. Collect as much evidence as we can if there are continued sightings and hopefully move you if we can.”

“But we’re not safe here!”

“I don’t disagree,” Roan said, not unkindly, “but there’s nothing else we can do. Our hands are tied.”

“Oh, so _now_ there are rules you have to follow,” Bellamy practically spat at him.

“None of us are happy about this either,” Roan replied in a tone that told everyone how seriously he was taking this.

Echo was quiet through the entire exchange. Finally, she looked at Roan.

“You know we have to tell them,” she said.

“We don’t have to tell them anything,” Roan shot back.

“Tell us what?” Clarke demanded.

Echo narrowed her eyes at Roan. After a moment, he threw his hands up in the air, signaling that she might as well continue.

“There was a break-in at headquarters. That’s why we had to check your safehouse.”

“A _what?_ ” Clarke shouted, before clapping her hand over her mouth.

“We don’t know who it was, what they were after, nor what they really got. We just know that our database was compromised.”

“Well clearly that’s another reason why you have to move us!”

“It’s actually another reason why we can’t. The department’s in shambles. We don’t have the budget, nor the leadership,” Echo explained.

“You shouldn’t be telling them all of this,” Roan hissed.

“Why not? They’re in danger,” Echo threw back. “They deserve to know why we can’t protect them.”

Clarke and Bellamy collapsed onto the sofa, overcome by exhaustion and shock.

“So that’s it, we’re on our own,” Bellamy muttered.

“You’re not on your own,” Echo told them. “We’re still here, and Indra, and Lincoln, though I agree with Roan’s earlier point about getting him re-assigned. If we can get a new fourth agent, we will, but even the three of us can do a lot to keep you safe. We also still have our inside agent in place and we can equip them with a signal beacon to activate if they learn anyone is making a move on you two. We’ll try to keep someone at least a quick plane ride away at all times.”

“A plane ride?” Clarke asked, incredulous.

“You’re not the only people we’re protecting,” Echo reminded her. “But I would recommend avoiding risks as much as possible. Try not to go anywhere alone – stick to public places. Check in with each other. Have codes to text in case of emergencies. We can set you up with a security system, too. We probably should have done that from the beginning, but we didn’t think it would be necessary.”

“And, to be fair, if it’s the Wallaces, they’re probably too smart for a traditional security system anyway,” Clarke pointed out. No one disagreed.

Roan had stayed quiet, but stood up now and grabbed his phone again.

“You going to call her?” Echo asked, and Clarke wondered who they were talking about.

“I think I have to.”

“She’s not going to like it.”

“But she’ll understand why we’re calling.”

Echo nodded and Roan moved away.

“Who is he calling?” Bellamy asked.

“A friend who lives nearby,” Echo answered vaguely. “She worked for our agency a decade ago, but left after a number of quarrels with Nia.”

“I like her already,” Clarke answered.

Roan returned about ten minutes later and took a deep breath.

“Ok, she’s agreed to keep an eye on you two.”

“Who has?” Clarke asked.

“Our friend. We can’t tell you her name. But she’s nearby and she’s… good at what she does. I feel safer knowing she’s here. We’ll add a contact to your phone that will just say ‘pharmacy.’ That feels generic enough not to arouse suspicion. If you find yourself in an emergency and need someone _immediately_ , call that number.”

Clarke gulped and nodded her head, passing her phone over. Bellamy did the same.

“I’m sorry we can’t do more for you,” Roan told them, sincere.

“Thank you for all you’ve done,” Clarke told him.

“I’m going to stay here tonight, on the couch, just to keep an eye on things,” Roan announced. Echo nodded, agreeing.

“I’ll head back to the hotel and gather up our stuff. And I’ll call Indra and catch her up,” Echo replied. She gave Bellamy and Clarke kind nods before slipping out.

“It’s late,” Roan told them. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll keep watch tonight.”

Clarke was insanely grateful. She was exhausted, but knew she wouldn’t feel safe going to sleep tonight with just her and Bellamy in the house.

The pair trudged up the stairs, the exhaustion of the previous hours weighing on them.

Clarke hesitated at the doorframe of her room. The curtains were pulled over the window now, but she could still feel the gaze of that man as he leant against the fence. She could still see the spark at the end of his cigarette, the point of his finger.

She jumped when Bellamy’s hand brushed her elbow.

“Sleep in mine tonight,” he told her gently. She hesitated for a moment before nodding and following him into his room. He closed the door softly behind them.

Without speaking, they climbed into his bed and lay on their backs, staring at the ceiling.

“I’m sorry I didn’t think about the whole power dynamic thing with Lincoln,” Clarke told him. She didn’t know why she was apologizing now, when what they had experienced this evening was so much more pressing, but she found that she couldn’t sleep without saying it.

“I’m sorry I took it out on you. That wasn’t fair. You’re Octavia’s friend, and you’re allowed to share secrets with her. I was out of line.”

His response sounded practiced, and Clarke wondered how long he had been rehearsing it in his head this week.

“I care about her too, you know. I worry about her too,” Clarke replied.

“I know.”

“I hated keeping it from you, though,” she whispered now.

“I hate that you did it too, but I know why you did.”

Clarke felt tears track down her cheeks.

“Bellamy? I’m really scared now.”

The room was quiet for a moment.

“I am too, Clarke. Promise me that if you see anything, even if you think you’re just imagining it, you’ll tell me, no matter what kind of fight we’re in.”

“I promise. You have to promise too.”

“I promise,” Bellamy replied.

The room was quiet for another moment.

“And I promise that whatever comes, we’ll face it together,” Bellamy told her.

“Together,” she whispered.

Bellamy pulled her into his side and she rested her head on his chest, her arm folded across him.

She loved hearing his heartbeat. She remembered hearing it when he held her after her father died. She remembered feeling it beating out his chest when she hugged him on her graduation day. She would never tell him, but it was one of her favorite sounds in the universe.

And, tonight, it was the sound that finally got her to sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A couple of things I wanted to share about this chapter.
> 
> 1\. A really helpful reader left me a piece of constructive feedback on the last chapter regarding the problematic power dynamics in Octavia and Lincoln’s budding relationship. To be totally honest, I hadn’t even thought about it, but when I read their feedback, I completely agreed. I did my best to address that in this chapter and actually tried to use it to highlight some of the corruption in Nia’s department. If anyone is concerned, here’s a tiny spoiler: nothing bad is going to happen between Lincoln and Octavia. I totally agree that this relationship is problematic, but I promise that nothing icky or scary will happen in this story. In other words, he could become a total douche, but he won’t in my story. A big thank you to that reader!
> 
> 2\. You have no idea how long it took me to come up with that stupid art store pun name. Way too long. I loved Diyoza in this chapter, though. I want to write a whole chapter that’s just Diyoza roasting Clarke. Get ready for that to be a reoccurring bit!
> 
> 3\. Please remember I don’t know anything about the actual witness protection program. I’m sure that they have much more official, useful policies than the ones I’m writing here. Or, like, at least I hope so? (Shrug emoji)
> 
> There might be a bit of a delay before the next chapter. Everything going on on the show has me down and really has me wanting to write a whole show fix-it-fic that takes over at the end of season 4. I’m feeling much more motivated in that direction at the moment, so I’m going to start that one and see where it takes me. But I promise I’m not abandoning this! I have the whole thing outlined and planned.


	8. Chapter 8

Bellamy woke up and, for one blissful moment, forgot all about the stress of the previous evening. As soon as he heard Clarke’s gentle breathing next to him, however, it all came back to him. He was surprised he had fallen asleep at all, honestly, but he was grateful for it. He carefully rolled over and smiled slightly at the sight of Clarke asleep in his bed. He was glad she had gotten some rest as well.

Her blonde hair hung in loose waves slightly past her shoulders. Her brow was slightly furrowed in sleep and Bellamy practically rolled his eyes at the sight – of course she would be stressed, even in her dreams.

He knew Clarke was a beautiful woman. He had always known, really. And seeing her in his bed… he decided to get up before he could think more about that.

He slipped quietly from the sheets and stopped by the bathroom to relieve himself and survey his face in the mirror. Unsurprisingly, he looked like shit. He thought he was probably entitled to that, though. He had to go to work today, but his watch told him it was only 6:30 – he still had nearly three hours before he needed to leave.

He was debating whether to jump in the shower when he heard Clarke shout his name from his bedroom. Within seconds, he was back at her side.

“What is it? What happened?” he asked frantically.

Clarke was on her feet, her hand pressed to her chest.

“I woke up and you weren’t here. I thought… I thought…”

Bellamy gathered her in his arms quickly, realizing his mistake. He had been so focused on not waking her up that he hadn’t realized what would happen if she woke up without him there.

“Shhh, it’s fine, I was just going to the bathroom. You’re fine and I’m fine. Roan is right downstairs.”

That last part wasn’t true anymore – Roan had raced up the stairs upon hearing Clarke shout. He stood in the doorway now, surveying the pair of them. Bellamy made eye contact with him and Roan nodded politely before backing out the door and heading back downstairs.

“What are we going to do, Bell? We can’t stay here.”

“We have to, Princess. It’ll be ok. We’ve got each other and you heard the agents – they’re going to be keeping a good eye on us.”

Clarke stayed in his arms for another few seconds before pulling herself away slowly and steeling her expression.

She took a deep breath. Bellamy hated how strong she forced herself to be sometimes.

“Ok, you’re right. I have to pull it together.”

“You really don’t, Clarke.”

“Yes I do,” she replied, avoiding eye contact now. Bellamy ran his hand through his curls in exasperation, but decided not to push her into a fight today.

“Want the first shower?” he asked instead. Clarke nodded decisively and headed to the bathroom.

While she showered, Bellamy headed downstairs to check in with Roan. He found the agent sitting on the sofa in the living room, scrolling through something on his phone.

“All good down here?” Bellamy asked.

“All quiet,” Roan replied. “We haven’t been able to make contact with our inside agent for the Wallaces, but we should reach them this week, and then we can find out what Emerson reported and what their plans are. We’ll be in contact as soon as we hear.”

“Thanks for that. Coffee?”

“I thought you’d never ask.”

They wandered into the kitchen and Bellamy started up the coffee pot.

“So on a scale of 1 to dead, just how much danger do you think we’re in?” Bellamy asked after the two men had taken a few careful sips from their mugs.

Roan smirked a bit at the question. “Maybe a 4? It’s obviously not ideal – there’s a reason we moved you away. But I just keep coming back to the fact that Emerson let Clarke see him four times and never made a move.”

“What do you mean?”

“If they wanted you two dead, they could have easily done it, no offense.”

“I guess that’s true,” Bellamy conceded.

“I mean, they could have grabbed you when you were out running one day. They could have nabbed Clarke from the parking lot at the hospital. They could have just shot you guys after that trivia night last night and disappeared.”

“Yeah, got it,” Bellamy protested, but Roan wasn’t done.

“And, I mean, they easily could have just come into your house while you were sleeping. Poisoned your food, set up an explosive, really so many options.”

“Yeah, definitely heard enough,” Bellamy protested again – and this time he noticed Roan’s slight smirk.

“You’re an asshole,” he told him.

“As asshole keeping you alive.”

“But not doing a great job of it, if there are like fifty ways they could have killed us in the last week!”

“But you’re still here.”

“You can’t seriously be taking credit for the Wallaces just choosing not to kill us yet.”

Roan shrugged his shoulders and took another sip of his coffee. “Whatever. I’ll take it. Maybe if they decide not to kill you for a year I’ll even get a raise!”

Bellamy rolled his eyes, but then stood up straighter as Clarke walked into the kitchen.

“Enough for another mug?” she asked, gesturing to the pot. Bellamy nodded and reached for a cup for her, filling it up and passing it over. Clarke drank it black, something that Bellamy couldn’t understand for the life of him.

“So what’s the plan?” Clarke asked Roan. Roan caught her up on what he was telling Bellamy – that they would reach out once they heard from their inside agent and that, until then, there wasn’t much they could do. He also introduced the other idea he had shared with Bellamy, that it didn’t seem like the Wallaces wanted them dead at the moment.

“I was thinking that too,” Clarke said calmly, sipping her coffee. “Emerson seriously had so many chances. He could have caught me after that shift at the hospital. He could have followed me to the grocery story that day he was tailing me. Even the night we saw him in the yard, he was close enough that he could have easily shot me through my window.”

Bellamy turned away from the pair of them and leaned over the sink, trying not to be sick.

“You two are unbelievable,” he muttered, incredulous at how easily they could talk about Clarke’s potential murder.

Roan and Clarke paid him no attention, continuing to survey scenarios whereby Emerson could easily have taken her or both of them out.

“So why didn’t he?” Clarke asked finally.

“That’s the million dollar question,” Roan agreed.

“I think we can assume that they will continue to watch us,” Clarke continued, and Roan nodded. “But it seems like we’re safe for now. Maybe they just wanted to make sure we were staying quiet?”

Roan thought about it, not committing one way or another.

“You should also probably assume that your phone calls are being listened to,” he told them. “I think our phone lines are still secure, but it wouldn’t hurt to be extra careful. Be guarded in your conversations. Don’t say anything about these sightings or what’s going on. Be extra diligent not to say anything about the Wallaces or your current location. If they want you to play by their rules, I suggest doing that, at least until our inside agent can take them down.”

“And you think you’re close on that?” Bellamy asked.

“I do,” Roan said confidently. “And we should hear from them this week, so I’ll be able to give you more details after that.”

“Why are you being so open with us about this? Before last night you wouldn’t give us any details at all.”

“Things have changed, here and at headquarters,” Roan told them. “Knowledge might help keep you alive. And, for some reason, I want to keep you alive.”

“Very reassuring,” Bellamy muttered.

Roan’s phone chirped with a text and he told the pair of them that Echo was on her way to pick him up. He went back to the living room to pack up his stuff and soon the three of them found themselves at the door, waiting for Echo’s car.

“Take care of each other,” Roan told them sternly. “I was serious about checking in often and coming up with code phrases. I know you two don’t like each other, but you are the best weapons each other has right now. I’ll be in touch as soon as we hear from our inside agent. Reach out to me anytime, but remember that lines might not be totally secure.”

Bellamy nodded and Clarke bit her lip, clearly committing Roan’s advice to memory.

Echo pulled up to the curb and, with a polite nod to both of them, Roan slipped out the door.

* * *

The contrast of the next few days with the previous few weeks couldn’t have been starker. Prior to the night Clarke spotted Emerson in their backyard, she and Bellamy had barely been speaking to each other. They had gone out of their way to avoid each other and refused to even make eye contact, let alone exchange words.

Now, however, an outsider viewing their relationship without context would mostly likely label it “clingy,” to put it gently.

Clarke continued to sleep in Bellamy’s bed every night. They had talked about taking watch shifts and tried it for a night, but when they both fell asleep on their assigned shifts, they decided that that was unrealistic. Instead, they relied on the security system Roan had had installed the day after he left to at least wake them up if someone tried to enter their house, even though they knew that, if it was the Wallaces, they had little hope at that point.

Bellamy found his pulse racing whenever he didn’t know where Clarke was. He tracked her movements, reassuring himself that he could hear the water running, which meant she was in the shower. He watched her from the window when she went to get the mail. He didn’t hover, but he tried as much as possible to keep her in his peripheral vision.

He also knew he wasn’t alone. More than once, he caught Clarke watching him and tracking him with her eyes. When he got up to leave the room, she asked what he was up to or where he was going. He couldn’t be annoyed, though, because he was doing the same thing.

They both relaxed a bit when they were at work. The fact that they were each surrounded by coworkers and worked in public places brought them both a bit of ease. Still, they checked in via text often. They had sat down after Roan left and come up with codes to text if anything was wrong. They tried to pick mundane, completely innocuous phrases and quizzed each other back and forth for the rest of the day until they were positive that the true meanings of the phrases were memorized.

“I’m in the mood for a milkshake” meant “something feels off, but I haven’t seen or encountered any specific danger.”

“Want to watch _House Hunters_ tonight?” meant “I think I just saw Emerson, or one of the Wallaces.”

“We’re out of dish soap” meant “Come home _now_ – one or both of us is in danger.”

And, finally, the word “apple” meant that the person texting had been physically taken. They wanted that one to be short, because in that situation they knew they probably wouldn’t have time to send a long message. Still, sending “apple” instead of “fuck I’ve been taken” could at least keep the Wallaces in the dark as to potential assistance on the way.

The system worked well, except for when Bellamy really did run out of dish soap and texted Clarke about it because he knew she was going to the store that afternoon.

She was not too thrilled when she cut her shift short and raced home just to find out that Bellamy was totally safe and, in fact, just out of dish soap.

She had been mad, but not mad enough to sleep in her own bed that night, so Bellamy was pretty sure they were fine.

* * *

Roan was true to his word and returned on Saturday with Indra in tow this time. After a diligent examination of the house and perimeter, the four of them had gathered in the living room to talk.

“You two might just be the luckiest people who have ever lived,” Roan announced first.

Bellamy and Clarke looked first to each other, and then to Roan, with matching faces of confusion. _They were in the Witness Protection Program after witnessing a murder by one of the largest crime families in the country – how exactly were they “lucky?”_

Thankfully, Indra stepped in to explain.

“We were able to debrief with our contact, who is still in place in the Wallace family compound. What I’m about to share with you is strictly confidential, but I’m telling you because I think this information will help keep you alive, and keeping you alive is my current mission.”

Bellamy and Clarke nodded as she spoke, trying to absorb everything she was telling them. Bellamy noticed that Indra rarely made eye contact for long, instead scanning the windows and doors, as if constantly expecting danger.

“Apparently,” she began again, “the Wallaces did learn your location from the information they hacked during the break-in, but that was only a small part of the trove they retrieved. They also learned the location of two former family members who had turned on the organization and offered testimony in previous cases, both of whom are now dead. They learned that the FBI was close to cracking down on one of their drug operations and quickly moved their stockpiles, though our mole is still in place there so we’re hopeful that we won’t lose the years of work involved. There were a few other things they learned too, but chief among them was a discovery that _we_ didn’t even know about.”

Indra’s phone lit up with a message and she stepped out of the room briefly, leaving Roan to finish the story.

“Apparently, Cage Wallace had a sister,” he told them, “or, I guess I should say he _has_ a sister. Half-sister, really – same dad, different moms. She’s ten years younger than Cage. When she was four, her mother, Dante’s second wife, realized just how dangerous her husband’s lifestyle was and tried to run away with the daughter. She was caught and killed by the family. One of Dante’s top soldiers completed the hit. In the process, however, the daughter tragically passed away too, or so the soldier told Dante. He died in a drug sting a few years later and no one ever revisited the story. Apparently, according to our contact, something in those files has Cage convinced that his sister is alive.”

“Do you know where she is?” Clarke asked.

“That’s the thing – we can’t find the information that they think they have. We can’t even tell _who_ she is, if she’s even alive. Nothing in our records seems to pertain to his sister. Our contact isn’t high up enough in the organization yet to see the actual files, just to hear the briefings at the organization meetings. We don’t even know why he is looking for her.”

“What do you mean?” Bellamy asked, knowing that he would always want to know where Octavia was.

“He means,” Indra continued, rejoining them, “that we don’t know if Cage is looking for her because she’s his sister and he wants to protect her and bring her into the family or if he wants to eliminate any possible competition for leadership.”

“And he found her location in the break-in?” Clarke asked.

“Well, he found out she was alive during the break-in, but not where she was,” Roan told her, “which brings us to you two being the luckiest people in the world.”

Bellamy and Clarke still looked confused and Indra rolled her eyes at Roan’s theatrics.

“On Tuesday night, Emerson was sent to kill you,” Indra told them bluntly. “He had been tracking Clarke all week to make sure it was really the two of you. He didn’t want to kill you in the house and make a mess they would have to clean up in a popular residential area, though, so he appeared in your backyard that night in an attempt to scare you. He was hoping that you two would jump in the car and drive far away, perhaps to a hotel or something to hide out. He was going to follow you and kill you in the desert.”

“But you didn’t do that,” Roan said proudly, “you followed our instructions and stayed put.”

“But why didn’t they just take us all out when you and Echo got here?” Clarke asked.

“Because,” Indra announced, “somehow at that exact moment, they found the location of Cage’s sister. Our contact says the whole organization was in a flurry. They were focused on one relatively minor attack and then totally switched gears at a moment’s notice and called it off.”

“Like I said,” Roan threw in, “lucky.”

Clarke and Bellamy both let out enormous exhales. _Ok, they might be the luckiest people in the world_ , Bellamy thought.

“Cage immediately called Emerson back to discuss plans for how to get to his sister. Apparently, that mission has totally consumed them now.”

“Can you find her and protect her?” Bellamy asked.

“We’re trying,” Indra told him, “but it’s not looking great. They appear to have far more intelligence than we do, but our contact is working on getting access to their files. We’re also not sure if she needs protecting – if Cage intends to bring her into the family, she might just become our new worst enemy.”

“And what does that mean for us?” Clarke asked.

“It means, for the time being, that you are off of Cage’s radar. I still wouldn’t move you because I’m sure he has someone watching for that, but as long as his focus stays locked on finding his sister, you two are small potatoes. Cage isn’t as thorough as his father was and there’s a chance that he might just decide to let you two go, provided you play by his rules and stay far away from Arkadia.”

“So we just… stay here?” Clarke asked.

“For the time being,” Roan confirmed.

“And just how much ‘time’ is that?” Bellamy asked. Neither Indra nor Roan responded. Bellamy threw his hands in the air. “So we’re still just sitting ducks, we’re just lower on their list of priorities?”

“Sitting _lucky_ ducks,” Roan corrected.

Bellamy narrowed his eyes at him. “Not helping,” he muttered.

“Look, we know the situation is not ideal, but we have many cases to manage and trust me when I tell you that you are in the least danger of anyone we’re guarding right now,” Indra laid out with her trademark bluntness. “You’re in the Witness Protection Program. You were always in danger. Are you in more danger now? Certainly. But we believe that we can continue to monitor the situation and keep you safe. And if the situation deteriorates or we get a chance to move you in a way that feels safe and feasible, we will do that.”

“I just hate feeling so powerless,” Clarke muttered.

For once, Indra’s eyes conveyed some genuine sympathy. “I know this isn’t easy, but it’s survival. First, we help you two survive. Then, you get your lives back. As much as I hate to say it, if you play by Cage’s rules, you have the best chance to survive right now. Our best chance is to take down the organization as a whole, and we think we’re close to doing that.”

They wrapped up their conversation soon after that and Indra and Roan departed, promising to check in with them again that week.

* * *

That night, Clarke and Bellamy lay awake in Bellamy’s bed. In the week since they had spotted Emerson in the backyard, Clarke hadn’t slept in her own bed a single night. Bellamy wasn’t complaining; it helped them both feel safer.

“I hate this,” Clarke announced for the eighth time that night.

“I know, Princess.”

“I wish there was something we could _do_.”

“You want to take on the Wallaces all by yourself, don’t you?” he asked, with a teasing tone. Clarke rolled over and smirked at him. “If it were up to you,” he continued, “you’d hide a knife in your shoe and a pistol up your sleeve or whatever they do in movies and break in.”

“I’d kick down the door, for sure,” Clarke added with a smile. Bellamy felt his heart race – he couldn’t remember the last time he had seen her smile.

“Way to sneak in without drawing attention to yourself,” he retorted. Clarke rolled her eyes but didn’t drop her smile.

“Well I would be the distraction,” she told him.

“Oh really?”

“Yes. I’d be the gorgeous blonde distraction that gets everyone facing in my direction.”

“And what exactly are you distracting them from, oh gorgeous one?”

“You sneaking in the back, of course,” Clarke told him.

“Oh, I want no part in this,” Bellamy replied. “You leave me out of your action movie.”

“You’re going to make me do everything,” she accused, poking him in the chest. He caught her hand and pressed the palm to his chest, holding it against his heartbeat for a moment before letting it go.

“That’s the plan,” he told her, quietly now. She watched him for another moment, biting her bottom lip, before she rolled to her back again. Bellamy stayed on his side for a moment longer, watching her.

“Maybe I won’t kick down the door then,” she told him, letting out a bit yawn at the end.

“You keep planning, Princess,” Bellamy told her before rolling over and going to sleep.

* * *

The thing about sharing a bed with Clarke was that the “going to bed” part wasn’t hard. They each kept to their assigned side, there were more than enough blankets to go around, and Clarke wasn’t one of those people who felt the need to keep talking to you well after you wanted to go to sleep.

The problem was the “waking up” part. While they each started on their separate sides, they moved closer in the night. Most mornings, Bellamy woke up either with his arm thrown over Clarke’s body or with her draped over his torso. He almost always woke up before her and carefully tried to extricate himself without waking her up. Clarke was a heavy sleeper, so he usually succeeded at this.

There were mornings, though, where Bellamy didn’t exactly… want to extricate himself. The morning after meeting with Roan and Indra, he woke with his right arm draped over her body, his left cushioned under Clarke’s pillow. Her hair was in his mouth and her back was pressed to his chest.

It was warm there, holding Clarke, and they were both so comfortable. It made Bellamy feel safe, feeling her so close. And some part of it felt so undeniably right. 

Miller wasn’t right. Bellamy wasn’t in love with Clarke. Yes, he found her objectively attractive. Yes, she was one of the few people on this earth that he trusted with his life. Yes, he maybe found her fun to talk to. Yes, he found himself looking forward to falling asleep with her and waking up tangled together. But that didn’t mean… Miller was just wrong. That was all.

Bellamy felt Clarke stir in his arms. She wasn’t quite awake yet, but she would be soon, so Bellamy carefully removed his arm and shifted to his back, trying to ignore the stab of disappointment in his chest.

Miller. Was. Wrong.

* * *

To both of their surprise, their lives started to feel normal again relatively quickly. They repeated Roan and Indra’s words to each other every day and, little by little, started to genuinely believe them. They _were_ low on the list of priorities for Cage Wallace. He could have easily had them killed and chose not to because they weren’t worth that tiny amount of effort. He had far more important things to attend to.

They told themselves that as long as they continued on as normal, they’d be fine. They’d get to go home eventually – and probably soon if the agents were correct about their progress taking down the family.

By Halloween, the two had reached a state of relative calm. Clarke still slept in Bellamy’s bed because nights were the worst: that was the time when their imaginations ran away with themselves and every tiny noise became menacing. During the day, though, they were able to reach a semblance of normalcy again.

On Halloween night, Bellamy and Clarke stood in their living room, pouring bags of candy into a bowl.

“Don’t put all of the crunch bars in there – I want to save some for me,” Clarke whined.

“We bought the candy for the trick-or-treaters, Princess, not for us.”

“Ok, then why did you hide the extra bag of Reese’s cups that you picked up yesterday?”

“That’s different.”

“How so?”

“I like Reese’s cups,” he pointed out with a smirk, “and I don’t like Crunch bars.”

Clarke narrowed her eyes at him, scooped a handful of Crunch bars out of the bowl, and carried them into the kitchen, storing them in the cupboard with his Reese’s cups.

“At least we agree on one thing,” Bellamy called from the living room as Clarke walked back to rejoin him. “The kids can have all of the starbursts they want.”

“Garbage candy,” Clarke agreed.

“Don’t let O hear you say that.”

“Of course not – I value my life, after all.”

They finished filling up the bowl and stirred the candy around to make sure every trick-or-treater had a good variety to choose from.

Clarke looked at the clock and back at Bellamy.

“Ten minutes until seven – you better go get your costume on!”

“I told you, Princess, I’m not dressing up for this.”

Clarke pouted and narrowed her eyes. Halloween was always one of her favorite holidays. Typically, she and Octavia spent a month putting together some elaborate group costume and roping Bellamy in at the last minute. He had been forced to play Gomez Addams, Professor Plum (ok, he didn’t mind that one – he got a pipe), Severus Snape, and one time even Fred from Scooby Doo, which had entailed wearing a ridiculously itchy blonde wig all night. Bellamy would have preferred to spend the evening in his sweatpants and t-shirt, but he knew he would cave to Clarke’s protests eventually.

At least this year she had agreed to forego a group costume, given that it was just the two of them, so it would have been a couple’s costume, something neither of them found particularly enticing. Clarke herself had decided to go as “a work of art.” She had spent the previous weekend painting swirls on an old tshirt (his, stolen) and a pair of worn jeans (hers, luckily). Tonight, she had painted similar swirls on her arms, hands, neck, and face. She had toyed with dyeing her hair, but had been too timid with it, so now she sported only hot pink tips. Bellamy had to admit that the overall ensemble was pretty creative.

Now, however, she was looking like a very _angry_ work of art.

“You do this every year.”

“You make me wear a costume every year!”

“See? It’s tradition,” she protested, pushing him up the stairs. “Go before I add your Reese’s cups to the bowl.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Try me.”

Bellamy glared at her before stomping up the steps. Luckily, the costume Clarke was forcing him to wear wasn’t all that bad. She had had the idea at trivia the previous week when there was a round on book-to-film adaptations. Bellamy looked in the mirror as he pulled on his khaki trench coat, plaid scarf, and distinctive hat. Clarke had even found a way to incorporate his favorite Halloween prop – Professor Plum’s pipe – into the costume.

He sauntered down the stairs, pipe in hand, looked at Clarke and offered a “Sherlock Holmes, at your service” in his best British accent.

Clarke giggled and the doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of their first trick-or-treaters.

They had a pretty significant wave of trick-or-treaters for the first twenty minutes or so, with groups of witches, superheroes, and ghosts digging their hands through the bowl for the best candy. There was a lull after that and then more groups trickled in for the next hour.

At one point, the doorbell rang and Clarke was surprised to see Diyoza standing there with a 4-year old boy dressed as Spiderman.

“Trick or treat!” the boy yelled, already reaching for the candy.

“Clarke,” Diyoza said, surprised. Bellamy headed to the door to check out who the person was who knew Clarke, assuming it was a co-worker or something.

“Hi Diyoza,” Clarke replied. Bellamy thought she sounded a bit hesitant. “Is this your son?”

“Nephew,” Diyoza told her. “Thought I’d give his mom a break tonight and take him around.”

Clarke introduced Bellamy to Diyoza and the two shook hands.

Diyoza surveyed Clarke’s costume, tilting her head to the side.

“You know, if you had gone with a deeper purple on the shirt, it would have matched the jeans more. The swirls are nice, but I think you should have varied the diameters a bit more, don’t you think? And I really think you should have dyed your hair. I mean, the costume’s great, but don’t you think that a bit more red would have really given it an edge?”

Bellamy ducked behind the door to hide the fact that he was basically doubled over in laughter. He watched as Clarke tried to keep a polite expression on her face, thanking Diyoza for the “advice” and wishing her a nice evening.

When she had closed the door, she glared at Bellamy, who was openly laughing now.

“Save it,” she told him.

“That was the highlight of my night,” he said, gasping for air.

Over the next hour they had a few more groups of trick-or-treaters, but by 9:00 the street was silent again.

“Time to go to Raven’s party?” Bellamy asked. Clarke agreed, carrying the leftover candy into the kitchen and swapping it for the bottle of wine she was bringing to the party.

She stopped by the bathroom to touch up her face paint a little before heading over to the party with Bellamy.

They could hear the noise from Raven’s party as soon as they stepped outside. Judging by the techno music, Jasper was running the playlist. Through the windows they could see people milling about, sipping from cups, and generally having a good time. Bellamy and Clarke entered through the back porch door, as Raven had encouraged them to, and Clarke dropped her wine off in the kitchen. Bellamy disappeared to join the throng in the living room.

“So glad you two could make it!” Raven shouted to them. Clarke took in her outfit, noting the helmet and white suit.

“Astronaut?” she asked. Raven smiled in confirmation. 

The next hour passed by in a joyful blur. The music was upbeat and fun, there were tables set up for a Spoons tournament (their friend group’s new favorite card game) and beer pong, and all of their normal friends were there in wacky costumes. Bellamy and Clarke lost spectacularly in beer pong, but Bellamy beat everyone in the Spoons tournament. He was so proud of his win that he tucked the winning spoon into his shirt pocket and carried it around for the rest of the night.

“We better get that back,” Harper grumbled. Clarke laughed and assured her that she would make sure he returned the spoon.

All in all, they were having a fun Halloween. Clarke missed her friends back home and their joint costumes, but this was fun too. Sure, she could have done without Dax dragging her out to the dance floor, but Jasper followed them there and his funky chicken dispersed any possible awkwardness.

As the night went on, however, the atmosphere in the party started to shift. More people arrived and their costumes were darker and scarier than those of their normal friend group. The house had been crowded when they first arrived, but by midnight it was practically pulsing. Jasper had started his fog machine and turned off all of the normal lights, bathing the whole house in an eerie, claustrophobic glow.

Clarke secluded herself in the corner for a while, talking to Monroe, but when Monroe had to go to the restroom, Clarke suddenly looked up and took in all of the changes. It was so dark and she couldn’t see anyone she knew. The music was far too loud and had too much bass; she could feel her entire body pulsing with it. She hadn’t drunk that much, but the fog was disorienting and she put a hand to the wall for balance. She looked from masked face to masked face, and suddenly found it hard to breathe.

All she could picture was Emerson. Suddenly, every face under every mask was his sneer, staring at her from the backyard.

She had to get out of here. She had to find Bellamy.

She staggered forward, elbowing her way through the throng. She found Raven filling up cups at the beer pong table and nearly choked in the relief of seeing a familiar face.

“Have you seen Bellamy?” Clarke practically shouted to her friend over the noise of the music.

“Not in a while,” Raven told her. “Sorry!”

Clarke backed away and scanned the room again. She saw Fox and Dax headed toward the kitchen and decided to follow them, hoping it was a little less crowded there.

It wasn’t, but luckily she saw Bellamy standing by the back door. He caught her eyes and she could see that his were as panicked as she thought her own were.

He crossed the room quickly to her and reached out to clutch her arm.

“You ok?” he asked.

She nodded, but quickly added “yes, but I think I’m ready to leave.”

“Me too,” he said with a relieved sigh. “Stay right here and I’ll go get our coats.”

“Let’s just leave now and pick them up tomorrow,” Clarke countered. He agreed with that and the two slipped out the door.

They had thought the noise was loud outside as they had walked to the party earlier in the night, but now having been in there for several hours, the outside felt deathly quiet.

They moved quickly back to their house, clutching their arms in the cold.

When they reached their house and had locked the door behind them, Clarke felt herself exhale a deep breath.

“That was intense,” she said.

“Yeah, that was getting a little out of control,” Bellamy agreed.

“I kept thinking I was seeing Emerson.”

“Me too. It was freaking me out.”

They got ready for bed and settled into Bellamy’s room, as had become their new normal.

Tonight, though, sleep was not coming easily.

“What was that?” Bellamy asked after a noise sounded outside.

“Just a branch, I think,” Clarke told him.

A minute later, it was Clarke’s turn: “Did you hear that?”

“Yeah – I think that was just Raven’s back door sliding open again,” Bellamy told her.

They traded these questions and responses back and forth for nearly an hour until they finally fell asleep.

Bellamy had an idea, but he didn’t like it. In his heart, though, he knew it was a good plan.

* * *

Clarke was surprised to find that Bellamy wasn’t home the next day when she got off of her shift. It was Sunday and she knew he didn’t work. She assumed he was out on a run or something.

It was a cold afternoon, so she made herself a cup of tea. She had just settled down to sip it in the living room and see what was on television when she saw Monty’s car pull up outside. This wasn’t that strange, as he visited Harper next door a lot, but she thought it was odd that he was parking in front of her house instead of Raven and Harper’s.

She set her mug down and went to the door to check it out.

After Monty had turned off the car, she saw Bellamy emerge from the passenger seat. _Ah, so that’s where he had been_. No longer interested, Clarke returned to her tea and picked up the remote.

She heard the front door open and close and the sound of Bellamy entering… but also something else.

She looked around and the first thing she saw was Bellamy with a very overwhelmed, slightly nervous look on his face.

The next thing she saw was the dog at his feet.

“Um, Bellamy?” she asked, wondering if he had seen the canine that seemed to be tailing him (no pun intended).

“Surprise!” he told her and the dog barked loudly to punctuate the sentiment.

Clarke grinned from ear to ear and ran forward to pet the dog, who was wagging his tale animatedly. It looked like some sort of labrador retriever mix, but she couldn’t tell what exactly it was. It was yellow, she knew that.

“What is all this?” Clarke asked.

“I got us a dog,” Bellamy told her, stating the obvious. “I thought after last night it could help to have an animal in the house that actually knows when a sound is alarming or not.”

“You got us a guard dog?”

“More like an alarm dog. He’s pretty friendly. At least part labrador retriever, but he’s a rescue so we don’t know for sure what he is.”

The dog barked and Clarke realized she had stopped petting him. She instantly sought to remedy that, rubbing his head.

“He’s a good boy, that’s what he is,” Clarke told him in a mushy voice.

Bellamy rolled his eyes.

Clarke straightened and crossed her arms.

“You hate pets,” she told him.

“Correct. He’s not a pet. He’s an alarm system.”

“We already have an alarm system.”

“Well this is a better one,” he told her.

“And he’s not a pet?” Clarke asked, teasing now.

“Absolutely not.”

Clarke peered in the large shopping bag he had set down next to the dog.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Guarding supplies,” Bellamy told her.

She picked out food and water bowls, as well as an assortment of toys and other supplies.

She held up an orange squeaky bone with a silly face painted on it.

“Guarding supplies?” she asked.

“Yes, that’s very high tech,” Bellamy replied, and Clarke laughed at him.

“Does he have a name?”

“Not yet,” Bellamy told her. “I was thinking ‘Dog.’”

“It’s really cute how you’re pretending like you’re not excited about this.”

“I’m _not_ excited about this.”

Clarke gave him a mocking nod. She looked down and saw the dog sniffing through her canvas bag that she had left by the front door. He pulled out one of her paintbrushes and started to chew on it.

“I think we’ll call you ‘Picasso,’” Clarke told the dog. 

“Are you sure he’s not more of a ‘Van Gogh?’” Bellamy asked in his best impersonation of Diyoza’s voice. Clarke glared at him and reached down to gently remove her brush from the dog’s mouth.

“It doesn’t even have a good nickname,” Bellamy protested. “What am I supposed to call him, ‘Pick?’”

“That’s kind of cute, actually,” Clarke replied, and Bellamy rolled his eyes again.

“Bark if you like the name ‘Picasso,’” Clarke told the dog. The dog barked. Clarke’s eyes immediately flew to Bellamy’s and she grinned triumphantly.

“That was a total coincidence!”

“He likes the name!”

“He’s a dog – he doesn’t know any better.”

“Come on Picasso,” Clarke said to the dog in a sing-songy voice, “let’s show you the house and get away from Mr. Grumpy.”

“Mr. Grumpy is the one who _rescued_ the dog,” Bellamy muttered bitterly under his breath before starting to unpack the supplies he had purchased.

* * *

They spent the rest of the day setting everything up and helping Picasso get acclimated to his new home. He did great on the stairs, to Clarke’s delight, and only had two accidents in the house (to Bellamy’s great… opposite of delight).

It was a chilly night, but Bellamy and Clarke took him for a walk before bed anyway. When they got home, they suddenly realized they didn’t know where Picasso was sleeping.

“You didn’t buy him a dog bed?” Clarke asked.

“He’s supposed to be an alarm system. I assumed he’d sleep in one of our beds,” Bellamy told her.

The three of them headed upstairs and Clarke and Bellamy changed into their pajamas and brushed their teeth. Clarke instinctively headed into Bellamy’s room and crawled in on what had become her side.

Picasso whined on the floor – he couldn’t jump onto the bed. Bellamy sighed and carefully lifted him onto the mattress before climbing on himself.

It quickly became apparent that the three of them were not going to fit.

Picasso wasn’t a puppy and he took up a considerable amount of room, especially with the circles he kept moving in as he tried to settle himself. Clarke and Bellamy weren’t used to sleeping close together and Picasso wasn’t giving them enough space to maintain their normal degree of distance.

“I guess I should go back to my room,” Clarke announced after they unsuccessfully tried to rearrange themselves for the third time.

“Oh, um, sure,” Bellamy replied, rubbing the back of his neck with his hand. “Do you feel okay sleeping in there?”

“I’ll feel better with the dog. I know he’ll wake up if anything happens.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Ok, well I guess I’ll see you in the morning.” Why was this awkward? They had only been sharing a bed for a couple of weeks. They weren’t a couple – they were barely even friends.

Clarke helped Picasso down and headed for the door, pausing to send Bellamy an awkward wave and call a “goodnight” from the door.

Bellamy heard them retreat to her room and close the door behind them.

His bed, which had seemed too small a few minutes ago as they tried to rearrange with the dog, now seemed impossibly large, cold, and empty.

Bellamy looked over to the side where Clarke had slept and the space seemed to mock him.

Pets were a terrible idea.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you’re thinking that it seems super convenient that the sister discovery was happening at just about exactly the same time Emerson was about to kill Bellamy and Clarke, you’re right to be suspicious – I promise it’s not just lazy writing! There's a plan!
> 
> Also, sorry this took forever. I have less time to write now that my kiddos are home (pulled out of daycare because of rising Covid numbers in our area) and every time I get any motivation I just want to write silly stuff for The Lighthouse Bunker. But I will keep working on this one too! I promise!


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